Lightning Crashes
by bigskydreamin
Summary: AU diverging from pilot. Scott met Peter before Derek arrived in town, changing everything. He ran away not long after, to prevent Peter forcing him to hurt his friends and family. Two years later, Noshiko Yukimura seeks out the True Alpha and his pack in New York to protect her daughter from an old enemy.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Diverges from canon right after Scott was bitten in the pilot. This story pulls from all four seasons of canon, but incorporates things in different but familiar ways. I'm putting a trigger warning here for the whole fic, as it will contain references to and discussion of an offscreen non-con situation between Scott and Kali that is highly relevant to the overarching plot. (The situation was NOT initiated by Scott, just to be perfectly clear.)

**Chapter 1**

New York City streets were difficult to navigate in the best of circumstances. More so in the midst of a torrential downpour, while seeking a place not on any known map. Rain came down in heavy sheets of cold, wet misery, painted a baleful orange by the glow of streetlights. The few pedestrians still homeward bound hustled towards centrally heated brownstones and low-rise tenement buildings. Heads down and skittering across the pavement, they framed a stark contrast to the lone Japanese woman striding through the dark.

Noshiko Yukimura turned a corner without even a glance up to check the signposts. It would have made no difference anyway - these streets were wholly unfamiliar to her. The last time she'd been in this part of town, it had all been forested woodlands. Her only road map this night was the silent thrum of energy cascading outward from some nearby source, each pulse timed to the rhythm of her own heartbeat.

A very nearby source, she realized suddenly. Noshiko paused, waiting for the next ripple of energy to rush over and through her. She retraced her steps half a block once it did. A soft ceaseless crash of raindrops on asphalt muted the normal cacophony of city nightlife. The shadowed alley she entered swallowed even that. All that remained was the slow dripping of the roofs' gutters. Her footsteps left no echoes.

"Hey lady, you lost?"

She ignored the man hunched by the dumpster in a leather jacket two sizes too big for him. Swept her eyes instead down the length of the alley, graffiti-stained concrete flanking a bare brick wall at the far end; a lone lamp above the dumpster washed any hint of color out beneath a sickly yellow haze. Nevertheless, the tug she'd followed three miles across town ended in this singularly unimpressive locale. The pull on her spirit had vanished the moment she'd stepped into the alley.

Noshiko sighed. It wasn't that she was in any way surprised by her surroundings, but she could admit to being a tad disappointed. It'd been over three hundred years since she last had cause to seek out Herne. Was it really too much to hope for that his tastes would have evolved even slightly since then? All that power, utterly wasted on a boor with no sense of theater whatsoever.

"Yo lady, I said, are you lost?"

No, you asked, not said, Noshiko corrected as she finally turned her attention towards the man lurching her way. She winced a moment later. Oh mother Inari, marriage to an academic was clearly taking its toll.

With pale skin and greedy eyes atop a scraggly brown beard, he shambled towards her with a peculiar kind of stutter step that reeked of bravado. If she was about to endure something as unbearably tedious as a mugging right outside of Herne's establishment, she was going to have words with her old friend. And not the ones she'd already intended.

The degenerate stopped short of her though, eyes squinting first before widening in surprise. "Hey, why aren't you wet?" He peered around her in search of a nonexistent umbrella, raked a second look up and down her perfectly dry black ensemble. Stumbled one bravado-free stutter step back. "You're not wet. Not even a little."

Mortals. Place a supernatural amongst them with claws and fangs bared and they'll chalk it up to unseasonable Halloween festivities. Give them one odd, inexplicable detail to fixate on, and they're running for the hills.

"It's an easy enough trick, if you know how," Noshiko said. She allowed the barest hint of her amusement to elevate the corners of her mouth, then spread her hands wide. "Would you like to see another?"

Magic uncoiled slowly in her gut, a long-slumbering dragon blooming forth from her belly. It peeled shadows from the walls and swept up steam from the grate in the ground a few paces distant. Wove them together in a twisting mess of gaping jaws and sinuous intent that loomed above her and between them until he was scrambling, falling backwards into a puddle, crab-walking through the mud and gravel. Only then did he find his feet and race off into the night.

A flick of her wrist banished the illusion and settled her magic back into the pit of her stomach. It did nothing for her unease. She remembered when that sort of thing used to be fun, the effortless whimsy of glamours that could put entire Faerie Courts to shame. Now it felt akin to pulling a muscle. She'd grown…rusty, to adopt a modern colloquialism. The past two decades had made her far too complacent.

It had felt so harmless at the time. The novelty of a stint in suburbia had appealed to her, just one more game of dress up in a long, long lifetime dedicated to staving off boredom in any way possible. It'd been the 90s. It was either that or the grunge movement and frankly the latter had just seemed exhausting.

But then Ken had wanted a child, and she was so enamored of him and his calm acceptance, his endless curiosity. And it had been so long since she'd last dared to try, last hoped that this one might be different, this one might last. Might be eternal. Like her.

And now. And now Noshiko didn't know what she'd been thinking. How she could have possibly allowed herself to be so naive, to become so attached? She knew better, or at least she'd once known better. But here she was, practically useless in her present state and reduced to begging for help from wolves of all creatures. She could not bury another child. It had been three hundred and fifty years since the last time, but she was not ready.

Even an immortal can be crushed beneath the weight of enough mortality, no matter that its not her own.

Noshiko stalked towards the end of the alley. A plain red door had appeared in the far wall once freed of the presence of human eyes. It hadn't been hidden by illusions previously so much as it had simply…not existed. It wasn't a place for humans, but any supernatural being in the city could let it find them if they cared for it to. And right now, Noshiko cared for it to.

She cared too much. That was the whole damnable problem.

Her knuckles conveyed her frustration when they rapped on the door. The djinn they conjured conveyed nothing. His skin gleamed like burnished copper, backlit by the glow of unseen braziers where it peeked out from under his T-shirt. Even the air around him grew dry and parched, and had Noshiko allowed any of the rain to touch her, it would have effervesced from the mere heat of his presence. At least Herne's staff understood theater.

Noshiko let her eyes fill with foxfire. The djinn stared back impassively.

"No violence is allowed within these walls," he said at last. His voice was the rasp of desert winds across ruins. A nice touch.

"None is intended," she assured him. There was an uncomfortable pause as he stared straight through her, viewing her heart's fire and weighing the sincerity of her words. She fidgeted for the first time in decades. The problem with djinn: they saw too much and gave away too little. Finally he nodded and stepped back. The door swung soundlessly open. Noshiko shrugged off her overcoat and tossed it at him as she passed.

"My thanks. Be a dear," she threw over her shoulder as she walked into the club, gratified by the faint shock that flickered across his face. Served him right for staring too long at her intents.

The door closed shut and a wall of sound buffeted her, courtesy of the siren crooning out a power ballad from the stage. It took her a moment to find her bearings. The club - far larger than the spatial limitations hinted at from outside - was packed wall to wall with a crowd that appeared to stretch from their late teens to late twenties at most. But when dealing with the supernatural, 'appearances can be deceiving' is a truism, not just a platitude. She didn't look half a century of her own nine hundred years herself.

And no one here was human.

Noshiko breathed in deep, allowing herself to drink her fill from the well of power saturating the room. There was more of it within these four walls than she'd been exposed to in the entire last twenty years combined. It was enough to make her dizzy, almost intoxicated from the sensations of being this close to this many beings all reeking of magic and the supernatural in their own ways. She could lose herself in a place like this.

Possibly why she'd spent so long avoiding it.

Probably why she shouldn't have. Growing roots was for trees.

As far as epiphanies go, that one came far too late, and so she threaded her way through the crowd. Hobgoblins and barghest on one side, a trio of encantado on her other. Two sylphs blew across her path like tumbleweeds, all streaming blond hair and long limbs tangled up in one another. She found her first wolf lounging on a couch on the far side of the stage.

Young, male, hair an undecided mix between brown and red. A naga on his right arm, forked serpent tongue teasing his ear; an undine on his left, flowing up and around the side of his body as though a river forming itself to the contours of his shore. Even amidst his flirtations, the young wolf's eyes never stopped tracking across the room, every now and then flickering a cold shade of blue. They paused on Noshiko, visibly registering her as someone worth noting before moving away. Interesting. And perceptive.

Her own eyes kept to an equally steady search across the room, settling on a small gathering of tengu where they clustered around a table. A girl held court at the center of them - light brown hair and flushed red cheeks, head thrown back as she downed another shot with a yip of victory. Her admirers celebrated her with a rousing cheer. Not a wolf, that one. No doubt the coyote that was said to run with their pack. Laughing, the girl tossed her hair and cast her eyes in Noshiko's direction. They flared vivid blue as the girl dipped her head with a smirk, one trickster's greeting to another.

The push and pull of the gathered multitudes didn't allow one to remain stationary for long. She let it catch her up and sweep her past the two teens, carrying her to the back of the room. The stage drifted past, a raised dais of shining steel and chrome that dominated the central space. Three men on guitars and a four armed drummer were massed behind the petite blond siren claiming the spotlight. She wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt that screamed ODYSSEUS CHEATED in garish pink letters. Her face screwed in a vicious snarl at odds with the melody resonating up to the rafters. Its power was blatantly seductive, unearthing long buried heartstrings and yanking them with a total lack of subtlety or finesse. The moment her magic felt Noshiko's attention captured by the song, the room dropped away, replaced by fields of white. The temperature plummeted, the air crisped with the promise of snow, and it was as though Noshiko had never left the mountain she'd first called home. In the span of seconds, her head and heart contrived nine centuries worth of false memories, all centered around a sense of static contentment.

Rude.

Sufficiently rattled, Noshiko pushed her way free of the crowd and up to the far back wall. Perhaps there was more reason than one she'd kept herself from places like this for so long. But this trip wouldn't be for nothing. There was the alpha, behind the bar just as she'd been promised. As young as the two from his pack, but with a bearing to his shoulders that belied his youth. He poured draughts from the tap, efficiently shuttling two beer steins down the length of the counter even as he kept his attention on the kallikantzaros settled atop of a stool in front of him.

She hung back to study him further, preoccupied as he was with his customer for the moment. The diminutive brute snarled something and flailed long, hairy limbs, almost falling from his perch. In response, the young alpha planted his arms wide on the bar and leaned forward, speaking firmly but low enough that even enhanced senses couldn't separate his words from the chaos around them. Whatever he'd said, it was nothing the drunken wretch wanted to hear. He raised on his hind legs and seemed poised to climb on top of the bar when the alpha slammed his hands audibly against the counter. His eyes flashed blood red and he let out a growl that cut straight through the music. All noise and motion ground to a halt, save for twin answering growls echoing from further back in the room. Noshiko didn't have to look to know the wolf and coyote were on their feet, their own eyes a bright shining blue. She did wonder idly if there was ever any need for the djinn bouncer to manifest within the bar, and if not, how that affected his benefits package.

The kallikantzaros wilted under all the attention, though she had a suspicion he wouldn't have been keen to continue his protests even if he were only faced with the alpha's red glare. Dropping from his stool, he scuttled off into the shadows, and the club's merriment resumed without skipping another beat. Nothing they all hadn't seen many times before, no doubt.

Noshiko swept in to take the empty seat before anyone else could stake a claim. The lingering stench wrinkled her nose despite her best attempt at decorum. "A kallikantzaros who can't hold his mead," she said as she settled herself comfortably. "Now there's a cliche."

The alpha had moved on to polishing a row of empty glasses, and he quirked his lips in a smile. Despite his best attempt at decorum as well, she suspected.

"There are worse ones he could be," he said. "What can I get you?"

"Actually just a few minutes of your time, if you don't mind. Not without compensation of course." She drew a flush envelope from inside her jacket and slid it across the bar. "Hopefully five thousand will be sufficient."

The werewolf froze and flicked his eyes from the envelope to her before resuming his chores at a much slower pace. Whatever good humor he'd regained after his confrontation had vanished in an instant.

"I think maybe you're in the wrong place."

"People keep saying that," Noshiko agreed lightly. "I assure you though, it's hardly ever true. You are Scott Delgado, correct?"

He nodded once, still wary. Wiped a dishrag along the length of the bar while studying her. "Can I ask who gave you my name?"

"I honestly couldn't say."

"Right."

It was a wonder she ever bothered to tell the truth. No one seemed to believe her even when she did.

"I know what their name was. But that was a good two hundred years ago and I never bothered to ask what they were calling themselves these days. I heard it from several sources actually. You're all any of us old folk seem to be talking about."

"Remind me to give my publicist a raise." Scott walked a crate of mugs to the other side of the bar without taking his eyes off her. Despite his obvious caution, she'd chosen the right approach. Her chatter was relaxing his tension ever so slightly, though he kept visible distance between himself and the envelope. No doubt to stave off even the presumption of temptation.

"So like a True Alpha," she mused under her breath, though of course he picked up on that as well.

"You sound like you're speaking from experience." He narrowed his eyes over a rising frown as he contemplated her. Crossed his arms over his chest, highlighting the twin black bands of a tattoo around one bicep.

"I may have known one or two in my time," Noshiko admitted. "Its been a long while since the last one I met though. That was…hmm, the sixties, I think?"

"I was told it'd been almost a hundred years since the last one."

"Such a sweet boy," she beamed at him. "I meant the 1760s."

That startled a bark of laughter out of him. Distrust still clung to him like a slowly dispersing fog, but his intrigue was obvious.

"Perhaps we can discuss that as well," Noshiko said. She tapped the envelope with a red painted fingernail. "I promise, I simply wish to discuss a possible business arrangement. Nothing illegal, nothing immoral. The money is yours whether you accept my offer or not, all I ask is that you hear me out."

"I'm well acquainted with the owner of this place," she added when he continued to hesitate. "Herne will vouch for me, and you must know that's not a claim anyone would make in here if it weren't absolutely true."

"You mean Henry," Scott said.

"Of course I do," she agreed, and refrained from rolling her eyes at the hulking behemoth eavesdropping in a booth across from the bar. Honestly, what was even the point of hiding his true nature if he insisted on remaining the most conspicuous person in sight at all times? Henry. Absolutely ridiculous.

Still, her name-dropping served its purpose, and the boy nodded, decisively this time. "There's a back room through that doorway over there that we can use. I'll meet you there in a minute." Scott gestured at a gloom drenched corridor before drawing the attention of one of his coworkers. "Tania, I'm going on break, watch the bar?"

A brown skinned dryad in a mesh tank nodded at him, oleander blossoms shaking free of her leaf-green hair at the movement. Scott slipped by her and out from behind the bar, stopping by Herne - no, Henry's booth. The envelope of cash remained exactly where she'd left it on the bar top. Noshiko sighed, and scooped it back into her jacket. No sense in leaving it lying around for someone else to pocket. Honestly, if she didn't have desperate need of it, she'd find such unflinching moral fortitude incredibly dull. What were they teaching children in school these days?

It came as no surprise when the other young wolf and coyote fell into step on either side of her while making her way to the backroom. (Though she could have done without the boy's attempt to see down her shirt.) Noshiko cast a glance over her shoulder before following them down the darkened corridor. Scott still stood by Herne's booth, but his attention was on the stage. She wondered what he saw when he allowed the siren's magic to do its work.

The three of them had just set themselves down in identical red high-backed chairs when Scott joined them. He took a seat between his two packmates, directly across the small round table from her. The air with which he regarded her was endearingly serious, and she suppressed an inappropriate smile. The venue and occasion brought to mind a few scattered memories of the 1920s, forcing her to fight off a wave of nostalgia. Ahh, now there had been a decade to remember.

"This is Aiden, and Malia," Scott said, indicating the wolf and coyote flanking him. "And I'm sorry, I never caught your name."

"Noshiko Yukimura."

"So you're a kitsune," the other boy - Aiden - said bluntly. She allowed an eyebrow to raise in mild surprise. Her aura was far too controlled to reveal her nature without her knowledge.

"What gave me away?"

"It was a lucky guess," Malia said. "You're Japanese, and he's kinda racist."

Aiden scowled at his packmate. "Bite me, Coyote Ugly."

"Get neutered first."

Scott held up a hand and the two quieted, shifting back into their seats. The boy with more of sulk than the other. "I'm sorry. They don't get out much."

Malia snorted and blew a lock of hair away from her eye. Noshiko bit back a smile at their charade. Oh, she had no doubt their antics were rooted in their youth, but they were not nearly so young as they played at here. Not with the way their eyes never quite relaxed even when casting jibes at each other, with how one of the three always kept their attention trained on her while her attention was on the other two. Their contemporaries probably fell for it often enough, seeing the inexperienced children they wanted them to see. Her own youth, however, had been in a time when twelve year old emperors ruled the world and child brides were led home by their husbands upon the first advent of puberty. She knew how little the candle of age mattered when next to the fire of actual experience.

And there was fire in these eyes. All three pairs burned when they turned to her as one.

"Now, I'd like to hear this pitch that was worth five thousand dollars just for the chance to make it."

"Five gee's, are you kidding me?" Aiden leaned forward. His eyes gleamed, and not for supernatural reasons. "Damn, Scott, why are you the one always getting Indecent Proposal-ed by older women -"

He silenced himself, jaw snapping audibly shut. Noshiko didn't get the reference (all pop culture tended to blur together after a few centuries) but made a note to look it up later based on the effect it had. Malia had risen half from her seat, fangs visible and growling at the pale beta wolf, who looked like he was about to sink through the floor. Scott had gone completely rigid, an impenetrable wall slamming across his face and locking back any hint of emotion.

"That reminds me." Noshiko spoke into the uncomfortable silence, not quite sure what had been said but with a suspicion as to its significance. She drew the envelope back from her jacket and tossed it onto the table, a peace offering and distraction all in one. "You left this on the bar."

Malia took the bait and pounced on it, riffing through its contents with unabashed glee. Her alpha frowned and made to reach out towards it, but the coyote snatched it out of reach.

"You, I will bite," she warned, and a weight tangibly lifted from the room when Scott closed his eyes and shook his head, smiling. The beta wolf finally straightened, color returning to his face though he still cast apologetic glances towards the other boy.

Now that had been no performance.

"The business you wanted to discuss," Scott finally prompted again, when the silence tarried too long.

Noshiko pursed her lips and produced a slim folder. Flipping it open, she slid a photograph across the table. All three leaned in to study it without a word.

"This is my daughter, Kira," Noshiko said. "She's eighteen, a student at St. Margaret's Academy in Manhattan. I'd like to hire you and your pack to protect her."

"Not really our scene," Aiden said doubtfully. "Is this like, an added security detail for her super sized birthday bash kinda thing, or protection from someone in particular?"

"The latter."

"Yeah, we're going to need more than that. Right, Scott?"

The alpha said nothing for a moment, still studying the photograph. Malia and Aiden exchanged glances before turning back to her.

"Yeah, we're gonna need more than that."

Noshiko studied her fingers, laced together on the table in front of her. This was not a conversation she'd looked forward to having, for all that she'd known it would be inevitable.

"A long time ago I made an enemy of another of my kind, though a different type of kitsune than myself. This one was a spirit of the Void, a nogitsune," she explained. Scott raised his eyes, head cocked to the side. Probably listening to her heartbeat, trying to discern a lie. That trick had never been particularly effective where tricksters such as herself were concerned, but he didn't need to know that.

"I eventually managed to strip him of his corporeal form and trap him in a prison of sorts. This was over seventy years ago, and should have contained him for seven times that with ease. But somehow, I'm honestly not sure how, he has managed to break free. And he has made it…known to me, that he is within reach of my daughter, and means to use her to seek his revenge on me."

Noshiko took a breath and spread the rest of the folder's contents across the table. Class schedules, friends, emails, texts, every piece of her daughter's life that could be captured in digital form. Some distant corner of her mind winced as Kira's specter railed at the invasion of privacy, let alone the indignity of sharing it all with complete strangers. But a living daughter was worth weathering the accusations of any number of guilt-born apparitions, and she ruthlessly quashed her misgivings as she continued.

"The nogitsune is a master of possession and illusions. He could have inserted himself into Kira's life by now in any number of ways, and I don't doubt that he has. I can provide means for you and members of your pack to attend Kira's school. From there, you'd be best positioned to figure out how the nogitsune has placed himself. And from there, destroy him."

Silence greeted her proclamation.

"Oh is that all," Aiden drawled. Malia made a moue of distaste.

"Ewww, school. I'm not going."

The alpha said nothing as he continued to pore through the contents of the folder. It took an effort to rein in the unease that was now making a resurgence. One would think nine centuries would be enough to teach anyone patience, but Noshiko Yukimura had never grown accustomed to waiting for anything. She was not a person one said no to. Certainly not a teenage wolf, even if he was alpha to a pack of runaways and delinquents. Resentment blossomed and spilled a bitter aftertaste into the moments steadily ticking by. Supplication apparently was not a look she wore with dignity.

Of all the things she had considered when plotting this course of action, she had not considered he might say no.

"I've had nine centuries to amass several lifetimes' worth of wealth," Noshiko said, forcibly calm and free of any ire. "I can easily ensure you never want for anything after this. Just do this one thing for me."

"Do me one little favor, said the ancient supernatural being." Aiden rocked his chair back on its hind legs, pondering. "That's never ended badly for anyone."

This time, a snarl almost escaped her. The wretched little beast had the gall to smirk.

"Why us?"

Scott's question startled her, so timed as it was to the rhythm of her internal tirade that she actually wondered how much he really did perceive from her scent, her heartbeat. He watched her steadily, giving no clue to his own thoughts, and a measure of respect trickled back into her awareness. It had taken her three times as long as he'd been alive to craft as impassive a facade as he sported now. Perhaps it had been longer than she'd thought since she'd last encountered a True Alpha. She'd forgotten they tended to be as precocious as they were dull.

"You defeated this nogitsune before, trapped it in some kind of cage," he said. "What's stopping you from doing the same thing now?"

"I am not what I once was. Time takes its toll, even on immortals. Too many centuries spending magic frivolously. Too many spent hoarding it to the point of rot." Noshiko shrugged helplessly. "The power needed even just to ferret out the nogitsune's host would be more than I can afford to lose now."

She needed something to fall back on, after all. If worst came to worst, and she was all that stood between him and her daughter…she couldn't face him empty handed.

She would not bury another child.

"You're centuries old and apparently know all kinds of creatures as old and powerful as you," Scott persisted. "Why us? You couldn't find anyone else more experienced, more knowledgeable?"

"No one I could trust," Noshiko said. "I told you. I've known True Alphas. And I know the nogitsune. I know how he and I are alike - both tricksters, both deceivers. His greatest weapons are lies, temptation, guile."

"Other tricksters will always see the lie before the truth," she articulated slowly, glancing at the coyote. Malia stared back unflinching. "We take it for granted that all others lie as easily we do ourselves. And so in any given moment, we're absorbed in unweaving a tangle that exists only in our own minds."

Scott nodded thoughtfully.

"From what I've heard told about you, from what I've seen tonight, the nogitsune won't know how to approach you," she finished. "He will know how to lie to you, he will know how to hurt you. He won't know how to use you. Because he has nothing to offer you, nothing you want. All he has are lies."

"And you're not lying to me now," Scott said as much as asked. "Centuries old, a trickster by your own words, but I can expect that just because your heartbeat remains steady, you're telling the absolute truth, right?"

Oh, but this boy saw better than she'd ever imagined. Noshiko smiled ruefully. "I could lie to you, its true. I suppose all I can ask is that you believe me. How human of us, don't you agree?"

The alpha cracked a smile of his own, but his contained no more humor than hers.

"But we're not human, are we?"

"No," she said. She heard the note of wistfulness in his voice, saw the way his betas both ducked their heads quietly. This was as good a place to ply her trump card as any. "I know you have a son of your own. How one Alpha tried a different approach to securing the power of a True Alpha for her pack. The boy's mother -"

"We don't like to refer to her that way," Aiden growled.

"I usually just call her Dead Bitch Walking," Malia supplied.

"Oh I like that. Simple. Catchy."

Scott silenced them with a glance.

"Your point?" He asked. There was a noticeable edge to his voice, but otherwise his mask remained intact.

Noshiko spread her hands. "The nogitsune is not a foe I can vanquish on my own. Kali is."

He absorbed that silently. His eyes drifted back down to the photograph sprawled amongst the other contents of Kira's life.

"Your daughter. Is she human?"

"I don't know yet. Its years before I expected to know for sure."

She reached across the table and laid her hands atop his. Scott looked up, surprised by the contact and her breath caught ever so slightly in her throat. She hadn't expected how young he would look. Hadn't expected it to remind her of how young she'd been, when she'd born her first son so very very long ago.

How could it possibly still hurt this much nine hundred years later?

"Give me those years, young alpha, and I will see to it that your son gets the same. I swear it. No child should ever be hunted simply because of who their parent is."

"No child should ever be hunted period," Scott growled. She smiled sadly at his vehemence.

"Neither of us is powerful enough to make as grand a claim as that. Let's settle for what we can."

He nodded and reclaimed his hands, making another quick perusal of the file. "I'd like three other members of my pack with me at the school. You can make that happen?"

Noshiko straightened. And just like that he'd made a decision and on to business, eh? Ah, the speed of youth. His packmates shifted to attention at his sides.

"I just need names and ages to start. It will take a few days to get everything together."

"Myself, Malia, Brett and Liam," Scott rattled off. "Make Malia and I seniors, Brett a junior and Liam a sophomore. Just pick some last names yourself, less chance of pinging some profile somewhere. Even Delgado won't work if I'm going to be in some school database."

"I should be there too, or at least take Ethan," Aiden protested. "Liam and Brett will be useless. They're too busy comparing dick sizes to be any help ever."

Scott held up a page from the file. "You noticed the school uniforms, right?"

The other boy took one look and flopped back with a snort. "Yeah fuck that, I'm out."

"Seriously?" Malia groaned. "Okay, we need to ask for more money. Scott, make her give us more money."

"How do you get more than unlimited money?" Aiden asked. He looked at Noshiko for confirmation. She stared back, bemused. "That was what the deal was right? We all heard it? Unlimited money, basically. Can we get that in writing?"

The alpha shook his head, sighed and stood. "How do we get in contact with you?"

"Use this email address." She slid a business card across the table. "My husband is aware of my true nature and the nogitsune. Our daughter is not. We would prefer to keep it that way as long as possible, though of course if revealing the truth becomes necessary to ensure her safety, there's no decision to be made."

Scott nodded, gathered her file and pocketed the card, the other two rising beside him. "We'll be in touch then. I'm sorry to leave so abruptly but its getting late, and the club's shutting down."

"And you have a child and a pack to get back too. I understand."

"And you never came back from break," Aiden muttered. "Tania is gonna be pissed."

The two betas' banter trailed off as they drifted into the hallway. Scott lingered in the doorway.

"Where was the nogitsune imprisoned before he broke loose? Was he in New York this whole time?"

Noshiko shook her head. "No, my family and I only moved here a few years ago when my husband took a teaching position at Columbia. I originally buried the nogitsune beneath a druid's oak in a small town in California, back during World War II."

"What was the town's name?"

She blinked, taken aback by the unexpected intensity behind his question. "Beacon Hills, why?"

Tension thickened in the doorway around him as palpably as a sudden pressure change. There was something of significance at play here beyond what she could see, but she was at a loss as to what exactly that might be.

"And you have no idea how the nogitsune got free?"

"No. I don't see how it could have, based on the way it was imprisoned. My only conclusion is that someone somehow let it loose, perhaps knowingly, more likely not."

The alpha swallowed convulsively. His voice came out disturbingly hoarse. "How long was it in Beacon Hills, do you think? After it got free? Before it came here."

Noshiko shrugged. "I couldn't possibly venture an estimate. It could have been days, it could have been years. I'd be more inclined to guess the former. The nogitsune feeds on chaos. Its been content to bide its time here in New York, as it has a larger goal in mind. But in a place like Beacon Hills…"

She paused, contemplative. "Let's just say if the nogitsune had been inclined to tarry in Beacon Hills for any length of time, it most likely would have made the news."

Scott mulled this, though she had no idea what insight he hoped to glean from any of that. "Does any of this hold some significance for you?"

"Not at all," he said, visibly forcing a contrived farce of a smile to his face. It couldn't have rung anymore false if he had said it around a mouth full of fangs. "Its just you never know what information might be useful. Goodnight Ms. Yukimura."

"Good night, Scott," Noshiko called softly after him. She remained alone in the dark, the wan fluorescents overhead having dimmed automatically with his departure. Herne's not so subtle way of kicking everyone out, no doubt.

The True Alpha, a creature of much vaunted honesty and moral integrity had just lied to her. Why? To what purpose and what did it mean?

Or, she was forced to consider as her own words came back to haunt her, was she simply perceiving a tangle that existed only within her own mind?

Noshiko sighed and made her way through the darkness, out the hallway and across the large (now empty, echoing) main room. Only a few stragglers remained, the band packing up their instruments, a vodyanoy mopping up a spill in the corner. She emerged outside into the cold, brisk chill of the four am hour. Dawn was still a ways away.

She lingered in the alley, just beside the elusive red door that was sometimes there, sometimes not as the few still inside emerged one by one. They each cast her an odd look as they left. It wasn't the kind of place one hung around after the party ended.

She'd never much been one for introspection, else she might be forced to read some deeper meaning into that.

Finally, it was just her and the door. And then it was just her and Herne, no, Henry, his vast bulk filling up the space beside her. No one exceptionally noteworthy in this guise, just a large, overweight bald man in a thick black coat. Not noteworthy but always noticeable. He'd never learned how to be someone you overlooked. At least not the way he studiously overlooked her now.

Henry reached up to the corner of the door and peeled it away from the wall, the wood losing shape and dimension as it came loose, til it was nothing but a sheet of red fluttering in the wind. He rolled that up and the thick tube became a gnarled oak walking stick. The space the door opened to was banished for another day, back to wherever it was that unwatched places go. It would reappear wherever he decided to open the door tomorrow night, if he decided to open it at all.

"I keep meaning to place a NO LOITERING sign outside." Henry finally deigned to glance at her from beneath thick, bushy beetle brows. "Its just there's so rarely a need for it."

Noshiko tilted her head and smiled. "It would have been rude to come all this way and leave without even saying hello."

"No ruder than just showing up out of the blue after three centuries and roping my favorite bartender into one of your games," he sniffed. "Not so much as a phone call in advance."

"But Henry," she protested lightly. "How would you even recognize me otherwise?"

He shook his head and shuffled down the alley, leaning heavily on his walking stick. She offered her arm at his other side. He took it with a grumble.

"It's 2014, Noshiko," he said when they paused to allow him a moment's rest. "Not sure if you missed the memo, but it turns out the world's actually round, not just a big flat gameboard for you to move pieces about at your whim."

"The world's whatever we choose it to be," she countered. "You understood that once."

He snorted. "Follies of a misspent youth."

She pulled away as they reached the alley's mouth. He could call a cab from here, she thought, overwhelmed for a moment by the struggle it took him to sidle past her to the curb. We are none of us what we once were. Lightning flashed overhead, and for the briefest of seconds the shadow he cast loomed large and proud on hind stag legs, antlers branching from his head up to the sky.

"You've grown boring in your old age, my friend," was all she said. "Do yourself a favor and at least buy an aggressively inappropriate sports car. I'm told it helps."

She set off down the sidewalk through the rain, smiling ever so slightly when his voice rang out behind her.

"Always good to see you, Noshiko."

The sour note in his baritone declaring it anything but.

But then, if old Herne himself could pick up sarcasm at this late hour, there might yet be hope for all of them.

For now, dawn was coming fast, and she had moves left to make before this night was through.

And she hadn't even started baking for tomorrow's PTA meeting.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

They took the rooftops home. The rain had settled to a faint drizzle, and it was quicker than following the maze of streets -

Okay, so it was a completely unnecessary werewolf thing to do. But when you possess superhuman speed, stamina and the ability to literally leap (small) buildings in a single bound, it just doesn't make sense not to indulge every once and awhile.

At least that's how Scott justified it, midair and four stories up. He landed on a warehouse rooftop, gravel scattering beneath his sneakers as he drove his toes down and transitioned smoothly from a crouch to a sprint. Crossed the length of the building in three swift strides and with a dip and a spring he was airborne again, sailing across a ten foot gap that brought him to a surface one story lower. Adrenaline burned through lingering misgivings from their meeting with Noshiko Yukimura, made everything sharp and clear and easy. Even if that only lasted as long as the brief run across the city.

"Parkour!" Aiden shouted from three blocks ahead, just as audible as the softly muttered 'idiot' from Malia, a pace or two behind Scott. He kept his laugh buried in his chest. It was never a good idea to take sides there.

The three of them set a brisk but comfortable pace, enough in sync that they required no communication to keep from falling too far ahead or behind each other. It took less than ten minutes to traverse the two miles from the club to the loft they called home. The building that housed it was a squat, ugly looking bit of brick and rotting wood, close enough to the harbor that they could hear the clang of buoys a half a mile offshore. Still, it was warm, and dry, and most importantly their landlord had owned the space since 1896. Which made the rent a freaking steal.

One at a time they dove through the window on the second floor of the building, landing lightly in the living space shared by their pack. Scott preferred to keep their comings and goings as unobtrusive as possible - they never knew who might be watching. As far as they could tell they were the only ones renting in the building. But as their landlord was a rather eccentric Sidhe of the Unseelie Court who showed up in mirrors the second they had a maintenance issue…it was hard to really be sure.

And of course, the key phrase there was Scott 'preferred to be unobtrusive'. As teenage alpha of a pack of rowdy teenage werewolves, most of whom had either run away, been kicked out, or ended up kidnapped by mad scientists with a steampunk fetish before their respective parents got around to teaching them manners - well, Scott knew better than to hold his breath on that front.

So it was with a spectacular lack of surprise that he shook the remnants of the night's rainstorm out of his hair and looked around to total and complete anarchy.

A tennis ball whizzed by his face on a ninety mile an hour trajectory towards the far wall. It rebounded and ricocheted back towards the kitchen where Liam was waiting with an iron skillet at the ready. He, Brett and Josh all seemed to be absorbed in some kind of game that involved him slamming the ball off any and all available surfaces while the other two tried to intercept it via a series of gravity-defying acrobatics. Scott couldn't tell if the object of the game was to catch the ball using the most ridiculous gyration imaginable, or to see who could ignite the steam coming out of Hayden's ears into a full fledged conflagration. With those three, it was a toss up.

The pack's second youngest female sat cross legged in an old stuffed arm chair directly in the line of fire, doing her heroic best to ignore the ball careening back and forth between her and the pack's ancient and battered TV set. A ricochet cut close enough to her head to stir her hair with wind from its passage, and she gave up the struggle. She whirled in her chair to focus her ire on - naturally enough - Liam.

"Do you mind? I'm trying to watch something here!"

"Reruns," Liam scoffed, backhanding the ball towards the lower staircase, forcing Ethan and Diego to duck and juggle the massive load of takeout food they were bringing up from the car. "Besides, you hate that show."

"I love this show," Hayden snarled. "It's my favorite show."

"I think you're lying."

"And I think you're a narcissistic asshole with no difference between the shit that comes out of your mouth and what comes out of your ass!"

Well, at least that answered whether they were on again or off again this week.

Scott skipped trying to referee that cage match and wandered around the backside of the couch, where Tracy and Carrie had barricaded themselves to hold a hushed conversation too low for even his ears to pick up.

"How's Connor?"

"He's fine, Scott." Carrie's smile was way more patronizing than was necessary, given that his question had been totally anxiety free. He was sure of that much. He'd been practicing. "He's been asleep for hours. I don't know if it's just that his enhanced hearing hasn't kicked in yet or he's somehow built up an immunity to these morons, but either way I'm jealous."

Right on cue, Beth stormed down from the upper level in a state of high dudgeon.

"Scott! Tell Corey and Lucas to stop having sex in the loft! The one where we all live! And smell everything!"

Corey swept theatrically down the stairs after her, bare chest puffed up because of course he was shirtless, because when did the fifteen year old ever miss an opportunity to walk around in as little clothing as possible?

"Scott! Tell Beth to stop being such a homophobe. In my own home. Where I live!"

"For the last time Corey, put on a freaking shirt and stop strutting around like you've got anything to show off," Ethan snapped from the kitchen bar where he was setting out the takeout containers with Diego and Aiden. The pungent scents of fried rice and kungpao chicken wafted across the room. Scott's stomach growled. "I am too young to feel this creepy on a daily basis."

Corey ignored him, per usual. "I have a right to be intimate with my boyfriend in my own home. Saying otherwise is like, blatant discrimination."

Ethan sighed. "It's really not."

Corey foraged on heroically. "It's pretty much the definition of homophobia."

"Not even a little bit," Ethan said, rubbing at his temples.

"Got anything to add?" Josh asked Lucas with no shortage of amusement when the dark skinned boy finally slunk down the staircase to join them. Fully clothed.

"Man, I just want to spontaneously combust in peace." Lucas sank down onto the couch with an embarrassed groan. "Is that too much to ask?"

"What did you think would happen?" Hayden asked from her chair, no sympathy to be found there. "You had to know we can all smell it."

"Seriously," Beth said. "I don't care what you do, I just do not want the scent of it in my nostrils!"

"Yeah, like you guys give off so many pheromones I'm starting to question MY sexuality," Zach interjected from way overhead. Scott swore to himself as they all craned their necks to look up at the younger boy, perched in his usual roost amongst the highest rafters. He really needed to stop forgetting to look for Zach there, given that he was practically never found anywhere else. Some holdover from the brief period he'd had actual wings thanks to the Dread Doctors' fucked up Frankenstein experiments. Personally, Scott found it weird, but who was he to judge?

"Not that there's anything wrong with being gay," Zach continued hastily. "Its just my only options would be Ethan and Brett and that's not fair."

"Just so we're all clear, there is no scenario in which I will ever be an option for anyone in this room," Ethan said.

Scott felt a migraine coming on, werewolf physiology notwithstanding. Aiden joined him in leaning against the wall.

"Want us to wade in?" He asked, sotto voce. Scott shook his head wearily.

"This has been building for awhile. Let them just get it all out."

Aiden shrugged but said nothing as Beth strove valiantly to corral the runaway fight back to its point of origin, bless her naive little heart.

"All I'm saying is why can't you guys go find a park somewhere and do it like Tracy and Josh did?"

Tracy's head popped up from behind the couch. "Whoa, how did I get dragged into this?"

At the same time Josh launched himself off of the staircase banister, hands raised in objection. "That never happened!"

Carrie's head popped up opposite Tracy's. "When was this? You and Josh? Seriously?"

Tracy groaned. "Can we not? It was one time, that's all. Not like it'll ever happen again."

Josh frowned and aborted all attempts at denial. "Wait what? Why not?"

"Do you really want me to answer that in front of everyone?"

Josh reared back, his hands waving expressively. He was always most animated when he felt slighted for some reason or another.

"Oh like you could do better or something? You used to be a lizard." He hissed the last word dramatically.

"Really Diaz? You really want to go there?" Tracy narrowed her eyes and jumped to her feet. And she used to be so shy and quiet too…Scott missed that. He really really did.

"Oh I already went there," Josh fired back. "I am there, checked in at four square, destination been there, done that."

"He lying," Corey said flatly. "Can't check in at four square with a flip phone."

"Seriously Scott," Zach whined from the ceiling. "When are we getting new phones? I mean, flip phones? I can't get ANY games on this. All it has is Tetris. Tetris, Scott! Tetris!"

"They're for emergencies, not toys," Ethan said. Corey snorted.

"Well its an EMERGENCY that Josh is so out of touch he thinks four square is still relevant."

Josh scowled. "If I beat him on account of he can't go five minutes without being a little shit, that's not homophobia, right?"

"Alright," Scott sighed to Aiden, confident that enough of the pack were making their way towards the lure of garlic shrimp by now that things wouldn't get too out of hand. "I'm gonna go check on Connor. Try and avert any actual bloodshed, at least?"

"Fiiiiine," Aiden dragged out with a frown. He'd rather sell tickets.

At least they were all still using their words instead of their claws this time, Scott comforted himself. That was progress right? Right. He pulled off his jacket and tossed it over the couch next to Malia and Diego - the latter carefully separating his fried rice from the carrots and peas mixed into it, the former poking her plate as though raw mice would have been preferable. Then again, with Malia that was probably true.

"I'll be right back," he told her, grabbing Ms. Yukimura's file from the back of his jeans and dropping it on the couch. "Fill everyone else in, okay?"

"Yeah, sure," Malia said. "Wait, was that just touching your ass?"

Declining to dignify that with a response, he took the stairs to the loft's upper level. "Someone save me some broccoli and beef."

"Scott, no, we have to give all the vegetables to Liam," Brett called up after him. "He needs his leafy greens if he's ever going to grow up big and strong like the rest of us."

"I will kill you in your sleep, asshole."

Oh yeah. All the other alphas just wished they could have his pack.

The upper level was curtained off into five separate areas - drapes and bedsheets strung from the ceiling to give each other as much an illusion of privacy as superhuman senses would allow. Nearest the stairs was the small space that contained Diego's bedroll and the bunk Liam and Brett used. Brett of course had long since claimed the bottom bunk, given that he was physically incapable of not being a douchebag to Liam. (Or if you went with Carrie's interpretation, he was totally in love with the younger boy and this somehow explained his behavior as well. It was hard to say. As he and his sister were the only ones of them born and raised within a werewolf pack, Brett was the best at keeping his scent under wraps). On the other side of the curtains came Lucas, Corey and Josh's room, and just beyond that the partitioned corner where Tracy, Beth and Hayden shared two futons between them.

Scott ducked his head into Lori, Malia and Carrie's room. Otherwise known as Lori and Carrie's beds and the mound of pillows staunchly defended by Malia as being far superior to any man-made furnishings. It looked an awful lot like an eight year old's idea of a fort, but they all had the good sense to keep that to themselves.

The twelve year old blonde was sprawled on her stomach across her bed, earphones in and watching a movie on one of the four laptops the pack shared between them. She looked up when she caught his scent hovering and pulled out an earpiece, head tilted inquisitively in the dim blue backlight of her screen.

"Food's here," Scott told her. "You hungry?"

She scrunched up her nose. "Is my brother being an embarrassing idiot?"

"No more than usual."

Lori rolled her eyes. "I already ate, thanks anyway."

Scott laughed. "I'll make sure there's some orange chicken in the fridge. Go down and heat it up later when you're ready."

She threw him a thumbs up and returned to her movie. If only her older packmates (particularly her brother) could be as low maintenance as her. He shook his head fondly and continued down the hall.

Zach had long ago made an actual nest for himself up in the rafters and successfully made a case for it being a superior alternative to bunking with Josh, Lucas and Corey, and Aiden and Ethan used the pull out couch on the lower level. That left the last corner of the loft for him and Connor.

Scott slipped through drapes heavy enough to keep the light from his room and let his eyes adjust to the darkness. There wasn't much to see: his bed, a table for his laptop, a trunk of clothes. And then the crib against the far wall. The twins had scavenged it from some garage sale and then spent three days scouring it with every cleaning product known to man, and a few known only to brownies. Even now it still smelled faintly of bleach. Scott worried sometimes that it might be stunting his son's sense of smell, but well. He basically worried about everything having to do with Connor, so grains of salt were required.

He leaned over the crib and gazed down at the nine month old. Drifted a hand down to sweep a curl of black hair from Connor's forehead. His son stirred in his blankets but remained fast asleep. Like Carrie said, he did have an uncanny ability to sleep through almost any crisis. Maybe it was a trait he'd adopted out of necessity…the only way to reliably get rest given the chaos that had so often surrounded his young life. Scott tried not to think like that. That way lay guilt, and as Aiden was fond of lecturing him, that shit wasn't healthy.

Instead he just breathed in deep. Inhaling his son's scent and letting the rhythm of his tiny heartbeat relax him, the tension and uncertainty of the day evaporating into so much nothingness. Babies apparently were awesome stress relievers. Okay, no, that wasn't even a little accurate. They were tiny terrors who crawled into danger at every available opportunity and were obsessed with eating things they could choke on and every single waking second of his son's life left Scott consumed with the certain knowledge that this moment coming up, this one right here, this would be the one where he fucked up so monumentally that his appointment to the Worst Parent Of All Time Ever Hall of Fame was all but guaranteed. Though if he was being honest, that moment had actually happened before Connor was even born, but -

Oh, wait, nope, there was the guilt again. Dammit. Aiden could be right. He might possibly have a problem.

But it was easy enough to get caught up again in the slow rise and fall of his son's chest, once he allowed himself too. In rare instances like this, where it was just the two of them, no chaos, no danger, no getting ready to run to who knows where for god knows how long - just for a few seconds at a time it was possible to believe that he could do this. That they might be alright, and everything wasn't just…terrible.

And then of course a crash echoed from downstairs and the murmur of voices cut off into abrupt guilty silence. Because his pack. Was literally. The worst.

"Yeah, you just enjoy your sleep while you can, buddy," Scott said to his oblivious heir apparent. He quickly changed out of his soaking wet clothes into something dry. "They're going to be your problem someday."

He regretted his off the cuff quip by the time he made it to the stairs. Why had he thought that was in any way funny? It was bad enough that his life was the mess it was just from being bitten in the woods, but to be born into it like Connor, with no choice whatsoever? Especially if Kali and Julia had been right, and his power as a True Alpha couldn't be stolen even by another werewolf. That it would always pass automatically to Connor no matter how Scott died…

Okay, seriously, enough. If his brain could shut off for even two minutes, that would be awesome. So awesome. Get on that, brain.

Everyone was gathered around the couch downstairs with Kira Yukimura's photos and documents sprawled all across the coffee table in front of them. Well everyone except for Zach, still in the rafters, and Liam standing below him, using just his mouth to catch the lo mein noodles Zach was dropping down to him. Scott was pretty sure he didn't want to know what that was all about.

Surprisingly, it was Diego who was sweeping up the remains of a lamp with a somewhat sheepish expression. Scott raised an inquiring eyebrow at Aiden, who was engaged in some kind of bizarre staring contest with Tracy. He made one little request - sure, he saw no bloodshed, but broken furniture had been pretty much implied too. They had little enough as it was.

"Sorry boss," Aiden shrugged when he felt Scott's eyes searing into the back of his neck. "Tracy was doing that oh so sexy inscrutable Oriental thing and I got distracted."

"Oriental is what you call food, Asian is what you call people, jackass." Tracy flicked a stray piece of chicken at the other wolf before smiling sweetly. With fangs. "And shit like that is why the only adjective you'll ever need to describe me is 'impenetrable.'"

Aiden grinned and leaned forward. "Maybe I meant I want to eat -"

A low growl echoed from the back of Tracy's throat. She leaned forward herself, eyes flaring gold. "Finish that sentence. I dare you."

"Don't do it," Zach yelled from overhead. "It's a trap!"

"Guys," Scott snapped. "Really?"

The two betas fell back into their seats, scents conveying shame better than facial expressions ever could. Scott held Aiden's gaze a beat longer. He didn't like feeling like he had a right to expect anything from one of his oldest friends, given how much Aiden did for the pack on a daily basis. And he knew shock factor and crude promiscuity were just part of the other boy's coping mechanism for the fucked up shit that was their day to day lives. But even with that, he took things too far sometimes. Someday he was going to cause real friction within the pack if he didn't learn when to rein it in.

"So is this bodyguard deal going to be our thing now?" Brett asked, sandwiched between Carrie and Malia. "I could get into that. Suits, dark sunglasses, business cards. We could call ourselves Full Moon Security!"

"Right, because the full moon is when people would be most secure with us," Ethan said witheringly. Brett flapped a hand at him.

"Whatever, it's a metaphor."

"That's not even remotely what a metaphor is. You're an idiot."

"This is a one time deal," Scott said before Brett could fire back. "If we do this right, our money problems will be over, and we'll have a powerful ally to help us deal with Kali's pack once and for all."

Nobody had anything clever to say to that. The mere possibility was enough to make Scott feel dizzy if he thought about it too much. Life without the constant threat of Kali and Julia and their pack, without looking over their shoulder, jumping at every shadow. They could finally find a real place to call their own. Maybe even go home…

"That said, I want everyone to be clear on one thing," Scott continued. It wouldn't do any of them any good to get caught up in fantasies just yet. "This is going to be dangerous. Yukimura was pretty vague about just what kind of threat this nogitsune is, but if she's as old as I think she is and so desperate she had to come to us for help, we shouldn't be underestimating it. If anyone wants to sit this out, I'm not going to hold it against you."

"Pfft, my middle name is danger," Brett said into the silence that followed.

"Your middle name is Eugene, you colossal tool," Liam muttered from across the room. Corey and Beth both giggled. Lucas coughed into his hand.

"Scott, we've been over this before," Ethan said. "You're an alpha of wolves, not a herder of sheep. If you say we're doing this, we're doing this."

And with that, all of them were looking at him, faces set in complete agreement. It took every ounce of self control Scott had to keep his own tidal wave of emotions contained. His pack might be a little rough around the edges, but he knew they'd go to the mat for each other every time. They'd proven it over and over again. Ethan was right. He just had to say the word and they'd follow. And…he didn't deserve it. The last time they'd all been looking at him like this, he got DeMarco killed. It was him Kali really wanted, him and Connor, and here he was putting them all in danger again just for his own selfish sake…

Aiden clapped a hand on his shoulder. "So what's the plan?"

Right. Okay. Scott focused his attention on logistics, rather than how annoying it was starting to be that Aiden could read him this well.

"Yukimura is getting four of us into Kira's school. It'll be me, Malia, Brett and Liam. I want one of us near her at all times. Malia and I will split her classes between us. Liam, it looks like she tutors after school so we're going to get you sessions with her. And she takes the subway home, but it'd be too obvious if we all took it with her so Brett, you'll match your commute to hers."

"Why'd you pick them?" Beth asked. "St. Margaret's is a really good school. I'd do way better there than Brett or Liam."

It figured that Beth would pick that part to be jealous of. "I was afraid you'd be too focused on the schoolwork to remember what we were actually there for," Scott said dryly. She frowned.

"Fine. But I want their textbooks when they're done."

"You're so weird," Corey told her. She shoved him off the couch.

"Tracy, Josh, and Lucas will keep their usual work schedules. I don't want us relying on Yukimura's money until we have it all in hand," he told the older betas. They nodded. "Hayden, Zach, Corey, Beth - you'll be on standby in the neighborhoods around the school in case we do have to engage the nogitsune and need backup."

"You need to take it seriously and stay out of sight and at the ready," he said sternly, when Corey and Zach exchanged mischievous looks. "The last thing we need is some beat cop chasing one of you down for truancy."

"Diego, Carrie, I hate to ask this of you, but I need you to watch Connor for me during the days now," Scott finished somewhat anxiously. Carrie rolled her eyes, and Diego just looked bewildered.

"Why would you not want to ask us that?"

"Scott, he's pack, not an obligation," Carrie said. She leaned forward to place her hand on his leg. Scott tensed, a fleeting second where his body coiled in on itself like a spring, but he forced his muscles to relax before she noticed. He wasn't quick enough to escape everyone's attention judging by the glances Malia exchanged with the twins.

"Yeah, uh, Ethan and I are pack too, last time I checked." Aiden feigned injury. "So what are we supposed to do? Are we invisible now?"

"I could work with that," his brother said right on his heels. His eyes glazed over slightly.

"You're picturing yourself in the guys' locker room right now aren't you?"

"Oh like you're not?"

"Not in the guys' locker room I'm not."

"I have something else in mind for you two," Scott said before they could get too carried away. "I need to check on a couple of things first though."

"Ooh, mysterious."

"I am intrigued," Aiden agreed.

"We're missing an angle."

The quiet declaration cut through the banter and focused everyone on Diego. By far the most reserved member of their rowdy pack, the seventeen year old was easy to overlook. It didn't help that he went out of his way to fade into the background as much as possible. After eight months, the lines he drew between himself and the rest of the pack were still clearly visibly. Scott just didn't know how much of that was due to Diego's own views as a hunter's son and how much of it was just his assumption of how the others viewed him, even now. It wasn't that he doubted Diego's loyalty, or that anyone else did for that matter. He'd proven himself beyond a doubt. Even Brett and Carrie had never held his heritage against him despite their former pack's fate. But there remained a palpable distance between the young Calaveras and the rest of the pack, and Scott didn't know what to do about it. Hell, he didn't know if Diego even wanted him to do anything about it.

"What do you mean?" Scott prompted when the other boy hesitated under their combined attention.

"I just mean that you've got things covered at school, but what if the nogitsune isn't at her school? All of this is information her mom provided, and yeah, she's ancient as fuck, but what mom knows everything her teenage daughter gets up to or everywhere she goes?"

Scott nodded. "Well ideally between the four of us, one of us can become friendly enough with her to get access outside of school."

"That might take too long though."

He shrugged helplessly. "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just not sure there's anything we could do to speed up the time table."

"You could ask her out," Carrie said.

Scott blinked. "What?"

"Its the simplest way to speed up 'access' to her," she elaborated. Scott was not at all comfortable with the implications of her air quotes. "She'd be safest with you, you're the best bet to sniff out the nogitsune, and if you're dating her you have the perfect excuse to spend time with her off campus and in her usual hangouts."

"And what happens when I ask her out and she says no and then avoids me so she doesn't feel awkward?" Scott asked, pointing out the obvious flaw in the plan. Carrie just gave him a look.

"Scott, she's not going to say no."

"Well okay, I guess she might not, but its still a risk I don't think we should take."

She threw up her arms in exaggerated exasperation. "You're right Scott, you're only hot, sweet, and responsible. Every high school girl's worst nightmare. Totally not dating material."

Scott blinked again. Maybe he was developing a twitch. "Umm, thanks, I think?"

"Nah, Carrie's right," Brett said. "You could totally seduce her face off."

"I'm not seducing her," Scott growled. His vision flashed red, and out of the corner of his eye he caught the twins exchanging yet another god damn look. He appreciated their concern in an abstract kinda way but he was really starting to get sick and tired of them treating him like a nuclear explosion waiting to happen. Was he the Alpha here or not? He didn't need the two of them and Malia acting like he needed to be protected from a few stupid words and touches. It was almost two freaking years ago. He was fine. Full stop. End of story.

"I'll do it," Liam said under his breath. He'd wandered over at last to kneel by the coffee table and had his chin propped in one hand as he leafed through various photos of Kira. Hayden perked up slightly over in her chair and narrowed her eyes. Brett scoffed and leaned over to hold a hand above Liam's head.

"Didn't you read the sign? You must be at least this tall to ride this ride."

"Brett, enough!" Scott barked. Everyone quieted and the blond beta sunk back into the couch looking like a kicked puppy. In the sudden stillness, Connor's agitated cries rang out as loud and strident as a siren. Scott rubbed his face in his hands. "Nobody is seducing anyone. Kira doesn't know anything about any of this, and our goal is to keep her safe and deal with this nogitsune while disrupting her life as little as possible. We stick to the plan, and figure out a way to fill in the gaps as we go."

"You want me to go check on him?" Carrie asked softly. Her scent carried the bittersweet tang of remorse, but it wasn't her fault.

"No, I'll do it." He already leaned on her far too much where Connor was concerned. It wasn't fair to her, or any of them. Connor was his child, his responsibility. "Okay, everyone good here? We all on the same page?"

"This is the stupidest plan ever," Malia said, popping a piece of chicken into her mouth. "I haven't gone to an actual school since the 4th grade, and I was terrible at it even then."

"I have total faith in you," Scott said wryly. She snorted.

"That's not saying much. You have total faith in everyone. Its one of your most obnoxious qualities."

"I have other obnoxious qualities?"

She slanted a sly coyote smirk at him and sauntered off towards the kitchen. Well then.

"Alright. I'll be in my room obviously. Everyone do me a favor and try to keep the noise down until I get him back to sleep?"

A soundless chorus of nodding heads answered Scott's request as he trudged back upstairs to his room. Their earnest expressions lasted about as long as it took him to reach the upper landing, and he could actually smell the full-fledged food fight that erupted the moment his back was turned. No, seriously, he could smell it, tracking the scent trajectories of the various leftovers as they flew from one end of the room to the other. He sighed. At least they were doing it quietly.

After a pause, he took a moment to look back down at the room anyway, taking it all in. The dusty old piano in one corner that Lucas and Corey had found somewhere and hauled home, because Josh for all his prickly antagonism had eight years of classical piano training and a special talent for soothing Connor to sleep with Baroque waltzes. The mess of brightly colored paint spatters and abstract shapes along one wall where Zach had started to paint a mural once, before his efforts had devolved into a full fledged paint war between he, Hayden, Brett and Tracy. The kitchen where Diego had learned he had no ability to cook whatsoever, after repeated attempts to make a simple stir fry somehow ended with the twins barfing outside the window. The counter Corey had accidentally smashed a hole in with a hammer when trying to help Lori make a birdhouse like she used to with her father.

As infuriating and exhausting as they all could be, he wouldn't trade a single one of them for the world. He just prayed he wouldn't fail them like he had DeMarco. Like he had Theo.

Connor was waiting for him in his bedroom, standing upright in his crib and clinging fiercely to the side while he wailed. The scrunched up expression of misery on his face was like a sucker punch to the gut every time Scott saw it. It didn't help knowing that this was normal for babies, that it wasn't always indicative of anything in particular, it still just…hurt.

"Hey buddy, I'm sorry, did I wake you up?" He scooped the screaming baby in his arms and started rocking back and forth. Connor burrowed his face against Scott's chest without the slightest dip in volume, his small frame practically vibrating from the force of his crying. "Daddy's really sorry, he didn't mean to yell so loud."

The only reprieve from his son's wails was the slight hitch when he took a breath, filling his lungs to fuel his next eruption. Not that Scott could blame him. How often had he heard the same completely inadequate apologies from his own father when he was young? He tucked his chin atop Connor's head and contemplated. He'd been losing his temper more and more lately it felt like. It was easy to blame it on the stress of everything. The weight of everyone looking to him all the time, all his frustrations and feelings of inadequacy when it came to Connor. He could even blame it on the wolf pacing restlessly inside him or wonder if he'd inherited some of his own father's temper. Scott had plenty of options when it came to pointing the finger somewhere, but problem was he didn't want to know what to blame for it. He just wanted to know how to stop it.

Connor quieted somewhat, but he suspected that was due to simple exhaustion more than anything else. His tiny shoulders shook with sobs and Scott had to resist the urge to squeeze him tighter. He reached down into the crib and grabbed Connor's favorite blanket, biting back a curse when he almost bumped his head on the unorthodox mobile spinning above it. It was an extravagant array of plastic with bits of iron, rowen, and rock salt dangling from each of its spokes, and Scott had nightmares of it falling and crushing his son in his sleep. He never would have allowed the damn thing anywhere near his kid, let alone hanging right above him, if Henry hadn't been so adamant that it could keep Connor safe from everything from faerie magic to a druid's seeking spells. Just one more compromise in a long string of them.

He was so fucking sick of compromises. Especially when it seemed harder and harder to tell the difference between compromise and failure.

Scott counted it as a victory when the scent of the blanket lured Connor away from his chest long enough to snatch it out of his father's hand. He shoved it in his mouth, something about the link between taste and smell at that age driving him to stuff his face full of whatever he decided smelled good, and his eyes blinked sleepily. Bright, vibrant gold. Yet again Scott wished he knew what it meant that his son already had a werewolf's eyes more often than not. Was this normal for born werewolves, or did it have something to do with being the child of two Alphas? Brett had been one of the youngest in his pack. He'd never had a chance to learn what was standard for children of that age, let alone how they went about teaching kids that young control of their shifts. And it wasn't like Scott was going to be able to keep Connor hidden away from the rest of the world forever. At some point they were going to need to know they could take him out in public without worrying about his eyes flashing unexpectedly, or worse yet, him randomly sprouting claws or fangs.

Thank God those hadn't shown up yet. He had no idea what he was going to do when they did.

"Well at least your problems are solved for now," he told his son with a rueful shake of his head. Connor sucked contentedly on his blanket by way of response, the only hint of his previous mood the flush of red staining his dark cheeks. Scott settled them both at the table and booted up his laptop. "Now let's see if Daddy's victory streak continues," he murmured, pulling up Facebook. The autofill only needed one letter to know which page to take him to.

His mother had never used Facebook before he left home. (Ran away, Scott corrected himself.) He'd only randomly searched on a whim one day, and her page had popped right up at the top of the search results. Set to public view, visible to anyone, with postings at least once a week. He was ashamed of how long it'd taken him to realize it must have been Stiles' idea, only connecting the dots when he saw that Stiles' page had similarly been changed from his secure privacy settings to public view. But then, he'd been ashamed to think of Stiles at all, wincing every time he remembered the horrible things he'd said to his best friend. It didn't really feel like it mattered that it had only been to keep him away and out of Peter's sight.

In spite of everything he'd been through since leaving home, Scott still thought those first three weeks after he'd been bitten were the worst weeks of his life. Faced with his mom and Stiles' confusion as they tried to figure out what was wrong with him, afraid to utter even a single clue for fear it'd lead them to Peter. All too aware of the lengths the Alpha might go if he felt they threatened his hold on his 'investment', as he'd once called Scott.

Dinner night with the Stilinskis, he read on his mother's page. The photo of her, the Sheriff and Stiles had been posted two days ago. Scott breathed a little easier for the first time since meeting Noshiko Yukimura. Whatever had led to the nogitsune's escape from Beacon Hills, the three of them were okay. That was something at least.

"Look, its grandma," he whispered in Connor's ear, and his son glanced up at the screen. He had no idea how good a child's spatial awareness was at that age, but it felt like Connor's eyes lingered on the photograph. "And that's Uncle Stiles, who would never ever be left alone with you cuz that would literally be the plot of a disaster movie."

The joke slipped out without his even thinking about it, the kind of thing he'd said playfully a thousand times before. Except the Scott that would have teased his friend like that wasn't a Scott who would have a kid by eighteen in the first place. He wasn't sure he had the right to make a joke like that now, not with the space (and words) he'd left between them. Sometimes he liked to imagine that the Facebook pages were Stiles' way of saying 'I understand' or 'all is forgiven.' Other times he was forced to admit they might have just been a favor to his mom, a hand extended for her sake alone. He hoped three weeks of being a total shit weren't enough to outweigh eleven years of friendship, but it had only taken one bite to derail his entire life.

Scott clicked through to Stiles' page, bemused as always at the wall conversations between his best friend and his new clique. He had no clue how those particular friendships had formed. Allison Argent, Lydia Martin, Danny Mahealani - Jackson freaking Whittemore of all people. And then throw in the trio of Isaac Lahey, Erica Reyes and Vernon Boyd…stranger things had happened, he supposed, like becoming a werewolf for one. But not stranger by much.

They looked happy, at any rate. Stiles was always smiling in all the photos he was tagged in, same with Lydia and Allison and Danny of course. There was something a little off about the other members of their gang, but they couldn't all be photogenic. There was another brown haired girl in most of the pictures of them all as a group, but he'd never been able to place her and she was never tagged in any of the captions. He scanned the most recent one out of habit and froze. For the first time, the mysterious brown haired girl between Stiles and Isaac had a name.

Cora Hale.

Connor let out a soft whimper of protest. Probably picked up on a change in his scent - god, he was going to have to watch that. He bounced the boy on his lap and clicked the hyperlink on Cora Hale. Her page was set to private, no big shock. Scott ran a search for her name on Stiles' page instead.

Who the fuck was Cora Hale? Peter had only ever mentioned one relative surviving the fire besides himself and Laura, the Alpha he'd killed. Derek, he was pretty sure. Mostly he just remembered Peter ranting about his idiot nephew's visits to him in a coma, about his guilt-ridden confessions that it was his fault, that he'd been with Kate Argent and she'd only known when and where to start the fire because of him. There'd been an element of urgency to Peter's plans because of it - like he needed to reach a certain stage of them before Derek arrived in town hunting his sister's murderer. Scott had always assumed Derek was the one who'd killed Peter when word of his old Alpha's demise had reached them. Everyone who knew the name Hale had agreed that Derek Hale was his mother's son, he'd set things right in Beacon Hills and keep it safe. Scott had clung to that, desperate to believe that everyone he'd left behind was safe from Peter once and for all. That as long as he kept Kali and her pack away they'd all be safe from the werewolf madness that had consumed his life.

But now here was Stiles in a picture with a Hale. A Hale his own age, a girl who most likely was a werewolf herself.

Search results popped up. He scrolled through.

Convinced Cora Hale to join Facebook at long last - Read a Wall post.

Movie night with Cora Hale. I rented the Wolfman with Benicio del Toro. Haha, she's going to kill me - read another.

And finally -

Stiles Stilinski is in a relationship with Cora Hale.

What. The absolute. Fuck.

That had not been there when he checked last week. He would have noticed it. Jesus, Stiles was dating a werewolf. A Hale who had to be a werewolf, given the joke about the Wolfman movie…and the fact that Stiles knew to make the joke meant that Stiles knew about werewolves.

Stiles fucking knew about werewolves.

The photo tagged to the change in relationship status had Stiles kissing the side of her cheek. Her eyes were closed. It was kinda adorable, Scott registered in an abstract sort of way, but like…deep, deep in the back of his mind abstract kinda way. He clicked through most of the photos tagged with Cora Hale. She usually had her eyes closed, of course, to keep them from flashing - except there were a few where she didn't. Mostly group photos. That didn't make any sense.

Unless they were photoshopped.

And the second that registered, he knew what was off about the rest of Stiles' friends. Isaac Lahey. Erica Reyes, Vernon Boyd, Jackson Whittemore. Their faces were all photoshopped. It was probably Danny's work, he'd always been good at that stuff, which meant Danny knew about werewolves too. And no way the wolves didn't know about the freaking Argents, which meant Allison had to know her family were hunters and she was still hanging with their gang anyway…

Except no, it wasn't a gang or a posse or a group of friends at all, was it?

It was a fucking pack.

"Aiden, Ethan, Malia, come up here please," Scott requested softly, knowing they'd hear him anyway. It was about all he knew right now. Stiles knew about werewolves. Was in a pack of werewolves, even though he still seemed to be human himself. Same with Allison Argent, the daughter of hunters.

Did Stiles know about him?

He had to be in Derek Hale's pack, right? Cora must have been one of his siblings, one Peter hadn't known had survived. But did Derek know his uncle had made a beta before he killed him? Had Stiles figured it out after he'd learned about werewolves?

Had he ever had to run away at all?

"Everything okay?" Malia asked, sounding uncharacteristically concerned when she peered through the drapes. Scott nodded and she, Aiden and Ethan slipped into the suddenly cramped room and took seats along the edge of his bed. Aiden leaned forward and tweaked Connor's nose, making faces and growling noises much to the boy's delight. Aiden had always seemed to be Connor's favorite of the pack. Scott tried not to analyze that too much.

They sat in silence for a minute - well, silent except for Connor's giggling. Aiden managed to combine a game of peek-a-boo with keeping a careful eye on his alpha. Excellent multi-tasking, Scott noted in a morbidly amused fashion. He'd give him a merit badge for it, if you know, they were a Boy Scout troop instead of a pack of runaway werewolves. His three betas seemed content to give him time to gather his thoughts. Problem was that ship had sailed. His thoughts were long past the point of any kind of coherency.

"The last time I saw my mom, I was half crazed on the night of a full moon," Scott said at last. All three of them snapped to attention, and yep, exchanged a freaking look. He didn't have the energy to be ticked off this time. Sides, this one was earned. It was an unspoken rule between the four of them; they didn't talk about things from before. True, they all knew things about each other the rest of the pack didn't. It had been just the four of them in the beginning after all. Well, them and Theo - (but if they didn't talk about this stuff, they definitely didn't talk about Theo). But they left it at that. They didn't have heart to hearts. They didn't monologue about the demons in their pasts. But he was the Alpha, goddammit, and he'd break the freaking rule if he wanted to.

"I was watching her standing outside the hospital on a break. Complaining about my behavior to the Sheriff on the phone. Peter was there. Goading me, trying to push me to finally make the kill, break my ties and become one of his pack. And I was close. I really…I was this close to doing it," Scott recounted. He closed his eyes, unable to ever forget that moment of sheer savagery, so wild and out of control and just done with the struggle to remain human that he almost did the unthinkable. "But he just couldn't help himself. And he made the mistake of making some kind of crack about my mom. I don't even remember what it was. And I…I snapped. And I bit him. He clawed at me, and the pain anchored me, and I just ran. Stopped by my house long enough to grab some clothes and money and leave a note saying not to look for me, and I just…took off, and didn't look back."

They knew all this of course, even if they'd never discussed it in words. Julia's damn spell had taken care of that, linked them for that one awful night and shared all their pain and painful memories between them, though they'd never actually figured out what the point of it had been.

"I've never second guessed that until now. I honestly thought I made the right choice. I knew Peter wouldn't hurt Stiles or my mom if I wasn't there. He never did anything without a reason, and he wasn't going to waste his two biggest ways of controlling me if he couldn't even be sure where I was to get the message. As long as I stayed away, they were safe."

"Scott, what's going on?" Ethan asked. Scott nodded towards his computer.

"Stiles knows about werewolves. He's part of the Beacon Hills pack, but I'm pretty sure he's still human."

"Fuck." Aiden blew out a breath. Connor giggled and the beta wilted under Scott's glare.

"If that ends up being his first word, we're going to have a problem."

"Part of a werewolf pack and dating a Hale," Malia said, examining the Facebook page. "Who knew he was so interesting?"

"Any idea how long he's known?" Ethan asked.

Scott shrugged. "I could probably hazard a guess if I spent some time looking back through his Facebook. In hindsight, there's a lot of jokes and comments between him and his friends that make a lot more sense if you're aware of the supernatural."

"But he definitely didn't know by the time you left."

"No." He was confident of that much. There was no way.

"So what do you want us to do?" Malia asked. The twins raised identical eyebrows at her bluntness. Scott wasn't sure why. It was Malia. "What? Is this a strategy meeting or a therapy session? Cuz if its the latter, I just remembered I have to go be bored somewhere else."

Scott closed his eyes, laughed, and shook his head. Whatever kind of moment they'd just had, it'd lasted longer than he'd expected. Baby steps, he supposed.

"I want you two to go to Beacon Hills," Scott told the twins.

"Umm," Ethan said.

"Seriously?" Aiden whined. "This is so not the super cool top secret mission I thought you had in mind."

"Noshiko Yukimura said she imprisoned the nogitsune in Beacon Hills seventy years ago. That's where it escaped from," Scott said. "I thought it was too much of a coincidence as soon as she said it, but now knowing that Stiles and a bunch of other kids I know from Beacon Hills are all part of the local werewolf pack?"

"It's starting to feel like the f-word." Malia wrinkled her nose. The two of them had similar feelings on the subject. Aiden, not so much.

"Fucking?"

"Fate, you moron." She dug a claw into his thigh and he yelped.

"It's starting to feel like we're being manipulated," Scott corrected. "And I'm very much over being peoples' pawn."

Ethan nodded, brooding. "Yeah, on that note. We're sure Peter's dead, right?"

Fuck. He hadn't even considered that.

"Kali seemed pretty convinced," Malia said. "Why would she lie about that?"

"Who the fuck knows why she does anything? You've seen her feet, right?"

"Okay, we're getting away from the point," Scott said, reining Aiden in. Kali's feet were among the things he was trying very hard to forget. "Speculation isn't going to get us anywhere. I think we need to know exactly what's been happening in Beacon Hills."

"So, you want us to just pop over to the other side of the country and check things out," Aiden sighed. "Any chance we can use some of that Yukimura lady's cash for a couple plane tickets?"

"Yeah, I'm not getting in a steel death trap 30,000 feet in the air with you the day before a full moon."

"Hmm. Valid. Fine, motorcycles it is."

"I wouldn't ask you to do this if I didn't think it was important," Scott said.

"It's cool," Aiden assured him. He smiled about as gently as Scott had ever seen him. "We get it."

Malia pursed her lips and tapped a clawed finger against her chin thoughtfully. "You know, it'd probably be easier for you guys to spend a couple days at the local high school. Simplest way to sniff around this pack without their knowing. I bet Yukimura could probably fix you up with some fake transcripts same as us."

"You're a vile, hateful she-devil," Aiden told her. She smiled.

"Misery loves company."

"I liked you better when you didn't understand platitudes."

"Its a good idea," Scott said, considering it. "I'll email Yukimura tonight, set it up. We can say we thought we might find some clues as to its current host there."

"Which you might," Malia said cheerfully. Aiden glared and reiterated:

"Vile, hateful she-devil."

Ethan laid a restraining hand on his brother's shoulder and stood. "We'll get some rest then and hit the road first thing. If there is something bigger at play here, its probably better we figure it out before you guys make contact with this nogitsune."

"Thanks. Be discreet, we really don't want anyone else thinking we have reason to be interested in Beacon Hills," Scott said pointedly. Ethan nodded.

"We'll be careful."

"She-devil," Aiden glared one last time at Malia before rubbing Connor's head farewell. The boy snuggled into it briefly; he'd started fading and was close to sleep.

"Get over it. You might even have fun. The redhead looks exactly your type."

"No seducing anyone," Scott said firmly, when Aiden started to perk up a little too much. The beta sulked, and even Ethan frowned. "I mean it."

"Okay, but what if we do it accidentally?"

"Seriously Scott, look at us. We're naturally seductive. It just happens."

"That's like asking a swan not to be swanlike. Swannish?"

"No!"

"Fine," Aiden dragged out and stepped through the drapes. "He never lets us have any fun."

"We should go on strike," his brother concurred.

"Mutiny!"

"Ugh no, then we'd have to make decisions. Decisions are lame."

"Restraining our natural seductiveness is lamer. We're too gorgeous to be this single."

Chuckling softly, Scott walked Connor back over to his crib and laid him gently amongst his blankets. Malia watched him from the bed. Her eyes shone faintly in the dark.

"I have a bad feeling about all this," she said, quiet enough it probably escaped the rest of the pack's notice unless they were listening for it. "You should have told Yukimura no."

Scott hovered over the crib, watching Connor burrow back into the sheets. He had his own misgivings of course, and he'd learned never to discount the coyote's instincts, but…

"I couldn't."

She sighed. "Yeah I know. Its another of those obnoxious qualities I mentioned."

"I couldn't return to Beacon Hills before now and take the chance that Kali would catch up with us there - too many innocents that could be caught in the crossfire. But if there's even a chance Noshiko can really help us deal with her and Julia and her pack once and for all…"

He turned to face her, defensive despite her eternal lack of judgment. "Its time we stopped running."

"Hey, you don't have to tell me twice." She rolled her head back on her shoulders and slipped bonelessly off the bed. Smiling that damn Cheshire Cat grin she'd wear even through Armageddon. "I just wanted to get my I Told You So on record, since apparently that's the only way it counts."

Scott snorted a laugh. "No, Malia, that's not actually a thing…you know what, never mind."

She winked over her shoulder as she strolled out of the room. "Whatever you say, boss."

Scott emailed Noshiko Yukimura before he went to bed. Two days later she supplied an address where they found uniforms, IDs, textbooks and backpacks waiting for four of them.

And phones.

"Wait, are those Iphones?" An incredulous Zach yelped from his usual spot. He dug a clawed hand into a support beam and slid to the ground. Scott winced and thanked god supernatural landlords don't ask for a security deposit. "Nobody said anything about you getting Iphones! If I knew that was the deal, I woulda done it!"

"You were never an option," Beth said flatly. And yup, she was definitely going to be holding a grudge over this.

"Liam, let me see yours," Zach begged. The other boy snatched his new prize possession out of reach.

"Hell no, this is mine," Liam said. "If I have to go to school and wear a freaking tie, I earned this phone."

"C'mon, let me just download one game! One game, that's all! Candy Crush. Bejeweled. Farm Heroes, I don't care! I'll do your chores for a week!"

"No Zach."

"I just wanna hold it!" He chased after the fleeing Liam, an amused Josh and Lucas following in his wake.

"Alright, guess this is it," Scott said to the rest of his assembled pack. "Time to go back to school."

Malia prodded a bag with her toe, frowning at the plaid skirt that rolled out at her feet.

"I hate everything."


	3. Chapter 3

Sorry for the LONG delay in posting, but thanks to everyone still interested in this fic after all this time! A reminder that I revised Chapter 2 a week ago, so if you originally only read it months ago when it was first posted, you might want to read that before you start Chapter 3 or you'll be lost with all the new characters.

CHAPTER 3

"Scott!"

He came awake all at once. No graceful slide from oblivion back to reality, just his eyes snapping open and sights and sounds and smells all rushing back to fill the void his dreamless sleep had left in place of thought.

Scott caught Lucas' slight wince of pain before the other boy could mask it. He released his iron grip from where it had snatched Lucas' wrist on instinct after he'd grabbed Scott's shoulder to shake him awake.

"Sorry."

"Nah, its my bad." Lucas shrugged easily, sliding his hands into the pockets of his light jacket. "Poking you awake with a pool cue from ten feet away was a totally valid option. You know, like a bear."

Scott took a second to process that. He couldn't tell if he was still groggy from sleep or if the joke was actually just random and not that funny. Lucas' sense of humor didn't always translate well to the rest of them. But at least his efforts were always good natured as opposed to his boyfriend's snarky barbs.

"What time is it?"

"A little after six. You said you guys wanted to leave for the school no later than seven," Lucas began. Scott surged into a sitting position, aborting his leap to his feet when he belatedly realized Connor was still snuggled against his chest. He must have fallen asleep holding him again, dammit. The books said it was important for babies at this stage to sleep in their own space - wait. Books. School. Fuck.

"I meant to be up half an hour ago," he hissed half to himself. He climbed off the bed, Connor stirring sleepily when Scott shifted him from one arm to the other to better snatch up the uniform he'd laid out the night before. Lucas smelled apologetic.

"Sorry, we decided to let you sleep in as long as we could. It looked like you needed it."

"That wasn't meant as an accusation, its fine," Scott assured him, spinning around in search of his towel. His room was like, ten square feet. How the fuck could he lose a towel in a space this tiny?

"Hey, we all told you not to take that shift at the club last night," Carrie said from the doorway. Her silhouette was framed by the drapes parted on either side of her, blocking the morning light enough that only a few sparse rays stabbed into the dimly lit room. Motes of dust drifted lazily in the bright shafts and Scott sneezed. Connor startled awake with a soft whine of complaint. "That was meant as an accusation, just to be clear."

"I had to talk to Henry about something," Scott defended himself. Carrie merely ticked an eyebrow further up her scalp. He spotted his towel sticking out from beneath a corner of his blankets and snatched it up in triumph. "Is the bathroom free?"

"For now. Diego is holding Beth and Corey off at claw-point though, so you might want to hurry. Their deference to their alpha can only outweigh their need for hairspray for so long."

Scott snorted, but really, where was the lie?

"Want me to give him his bath?" Carrie asked, nodding towards Connor. Scott shook his head. It was bad enough that he wasn't going to be here with him during the day for the first time in god knows how long. He'd only just gotten used to being gone for several hours at night while Connor was usually sleeping. Stability, feel free to make an appearance in their lives any day now, kay thanks.

"I've got it. Where are Malia, Brett and Liam at?"

"They're all finishing getting ready. They'll be good to go whenever you are."

"Good. Lucas, find Josh and Tracy and meet me on the roof in twenty minutes? I need to talk to you guys before I leave."

"You got it," Lucas nodded. Scott brushed past him and Carrie, headed towards the sole bathroom fifteen teenagers and a baby shared. And yes, it was every bit as terrible as it sounded.

"Scott!" A duet of complaint greeted him at the doorway to the bathroom. Corey and Beth slipped under Diego's outstretched arms and stumbled directly into his path, but Scott was saved from having to level a glare of his own at the two when Connor whirled and directed the full force of his golden-eyed cranky baby morning face at them first. They wilted. Beth was the first to rally.

"Just because not all of us get to go to the actual school with you doesn't mean we don't all need to feel like actual presentable human beings," Beth said, and yup, there was that grudge, right on schedule. "I've been waiting to use the bathroom for an hour. An hour, Scott!"

"You used the bathroom when you woke up," Diego corrected. "You've been waiting an hour to fix a few stray strands of your hair."

"That's what she said," Corey insisted, and oh god, Corey and Beth on the same page about something? It was too early to handle something this unnatural.

"Everyone has something to do today. We all have to prioritize the bathroom in order of who needs to be where first. I won't be long, you two can use it then," Scott said.

"How long?"

"As long as it takes, Beth," Scott sighed. "Now the sooner I get in there, the sooner you can get in there."

They parted reluctantly and Scott darted between them before they could find a new argument. He closed the bathroom door behind him and set Connor down on a pile of towels on the floor. He was in and out of the shower in about three minutes, keeping his eyes on his son the whole time. Thankfully, Connor decided the mist and stray droplets falling beyond the tub and onto him were cause for celebration rather than concern, and he clapped his hands and burbled.

That mood soured fast once Scott had dried off, filled the tub and tried to set him down in the water. Connor squirmed, kicking against his father's chest with early hints of werewolf strength. The second he was fully seated in the tub, he reverted back to good humor and splashed water everywhere with great enthusiasm. Scott was starting to get whiplash.

Wrestling a hyperactive werewolf baby into something resembling a state of good hygiene was no easy feat, and he was still at it when ten minutes later the door swung open and someone barged in reeking of frustration. Scott had a verbal lashing all at the ready for whichever of the two had caved to impatience when he realized it was Liam instead.

The younger boy was the very picture of misery in his gray slacks, black dress shoes and a button down white shirt. His hair stuck out wildly in all directions thanks to a very haphazard application of hair gel, and the striped crimson and gold tie meant to complete the ensemble was looped around his collar and knotted in a death grip around one hand.

"Ties are stupid," Liam declared with no shortage of venom. "Can you do it?"

"I tried already, but he didn't want my help," Hayden said. She leaned against the doorframe, examining her nails. Beth and Corey poked their heads around her, mouths open in objection, but Scott let his eyes flash red. Their heads popped back out of sight with an audible 'whoosh.' Huh. He really needed to just start leading with the alpha eyes thing first.

"You weren't helping me, you were insulting me." Liam glared. She shrugged.

"I have a process."

"Hayden, can you close the door and give us a few minutes?" She heaved a melodramatic sigh but departed accordingly. "Let me finish up with Connor here and then I'll see what I can do."

"Thanks."

Scott finished bathing Connor and set him back down on the floor to dry him off. Liam watched, saying nothing, but his scent was thick with the kind of mixed, repressed chemo-signals that tended to indicate someone had something they wanted to say, but just weren't sure how. He waited patiently for the beta to find the right words. Liam had never responded well to being pushed.

"Beth was right, she should be going instead of me," Liam blurted out at last. His posture portrayed dejection with slumped shoulders and a bowed head, but his scent had cleared and now screamed resentment with a overlay of bitterness. And a touch of fear? Scott frowned.

"Why do you think that? Did she say something else to you?"

"No, but I just…I'm gonna mess this up. I was always getting in trouble at my old school, and that was over two years ago! I don't know any of the stuff they're going to expect me to know."

Scott absorbed that as he got dressed in his own uniform. Connor sat silently at his feet now, blinking up at them both with sharp, clear eyes.

Liam was a unique situation in a pack full of unique situations. He'd been fully human when he ran away from home at fourteen. He was always particularly resistant about talking about his childhood, but they knew his parents had separated when he was young, and while Scott didn't think his father had been physically abusive, there'd definitely been emotional abuse involved whenever Liam stayed with him. Add to that he'd been diagnosed with IED when he was still in middle school, and Scott figured it had been pretty much inevitable that the right explosive situation had led to him running away. He was sure whatever the inciting incident had been, Liam blamed himself for it more than he should, as any time the subject was even tangentially breached the young teen practically reeked of guilt and self-loathing.

He'd been living on the streets of Chicago when the pack had happened across him during their first desperate flight from Kali's pack. A scrawny, malnourished street punk who picked pockets and turned tricks and had seen and lived as much as any of them by the time he got in the middle of things. And he never left, despite not having any obligation to any of them and a million reasons to be anywhere else. He'd already been pack by the time a life threatening injury forced Scott to risk giving him the bite, but Scott had always felt inadequate at finding ways to get him to see that.

"You know that none of the rest of us are going to be any better prepared for this than you are, right? I haven't been to school for three years, Brett for at least two, and Malia's still working on getting to an eighth grade reading level."

"I'm gonna look stupid though."

Scott knelt in front of his beta and forced his chin up to look him in the eyes. "Hey. I'm pretty sure all of us are going to look stupid at some point. You just have to remember why we're really there and what we're there to do. That's why I picked you to come."

Confusion clouded the younger boy's eyes. "What do you mean?"

"You have good instincts. They kept you alive when you were all on your own, long before you had claws or superhuman healing to rely on. And more importantly, you care about protecting people. Like this girl. I'm not saying the others don't, you all do, but a lot of them are still so used to looking out for themselves first and foremost, it takes them a little bit longer to get there. You've never hesitated to charge right in once you decide someone needs you. Like in Chicago."

Liam bit his lip and tried to duck his head back down, but Scott wouldn't let him. "I was scared though. Scott - I was so fucking terrified…"

"I know you were," Scott said gently. "I also know that you didn't let that stop you. And that's what matters."

"But what about my IED? I get so mad sometimes even when its just the pack…what if some human kid starts making fun of me for being stupid and I lose it?"

"You gotta have more faith in yourself," Scott chided. "And if you can't do that, have faith in us. We're going to be there with you. If anything happens, we'll handle it just like we always do. As a pack."

"Okay," Liam whispered. He nodded, his voice strengthening. "I can do that."

Scott squeezed his shoulder. "I know you can."

A knock on the door interrupted them, and Brett stuck his head in.

"Hey, Hayden said you guys needed help with something?"

Scott cocked his head. "Depends. You know anything about tying ties?"

"Oh. Sure!" Brett stepped into the bathroom, looking like he'd stepped out of a brochure for the school. Every inch of his uniform was perfectly fitted and starched, and his tie hung down his torso in clean, straight lines. "We had uniforms like this at my old school."

"So did we," Liam offered unexpectedly when Brett reached up to grab both ends of his tie. The blond beta froze. Subtly sniffed the air. That was more information about Liam's past than he'd volunteered in months. "I always sucked at it though."

"Probably just cause nobody ever showed you the right way to do it." Brett said, deliberately casual. Scott let a fond smile stretch his lips. "It's actually pretty easy, I'll show you."

"Can you guys get Connor's breakfast ready? I need to check with the others real quick, and then we've got to get going."

"No probs," Liam said with more of his usual good humor. His face lit up when Scott picked his son up and carefully handed him over.

"He's a baby, not a bomb." Brett squinted at the ginger care with which Liam handled the squirming bundle.

"Shut up."

Tracy, Josh and Lucas were all waiting on the roof when Scott climbed up the fire escape. Dawn had broken fully, and the air was filled with the honks of car horns, the pounding of jackhammers and other construction work. Melancholy cries came from the seagulls circling overhead, ever present this close to the harbor. The crisp October breeze carried the smells of salt water and the hurried panic of humanity's morning commutes in equal measure.

The three betas turned as one to face him where they waited by the far edge of the roof, and he felt a rush of gratitude for their easy patience. He was feeling Ethan and Aiden's absence more keenly than he'd expected. It was only two days since he sent them off towards Beacon Hills, but the three of them and Malia had been at each others' sides nonstop for the past three years. It was easy to overlook sometimes how much he'd come to rely on their ready support, but these three had stepped just as easily into the hole left by the twins for the time being.

"So we're assuming whatever this is about, you want it on the down low," Josh surmised in low tones once Scott had joined them. The roof was the pack's usual place for when they had things they didn't want others overhearing. It was far enough above the main living areas that low voices combined with the ambient background noise of the outdoors were sufficient to keep things private.

"The novelty of this job plus the chance to be able to finally stand and face Kali's pack has been good for morale," Scott said. "I'd prefer not to mess with that unless I absolutely have to."

"You think this is too good to be true?" Lucas asked.

"I think we can't afford to take anything at face value. Tracey, you've looked at the IDs and transcripts Yukimura set up for us, right? Anything you can tell us from that?"

The Asian American girl chewed her lip, deep in thought as she considered the question. Her own hacking skills were nothing to sneeze at, especially ever since they arrived in New York and she'd apprenticed herself to a self-professed 'cybermancer' named Tobias. By all appearances nothing more than a frazzled, hyperactive college student, he was definitely far older than he seemed. No one had any idea if that indicated a supernatural nature all his own, or merely enough proficiency with magic to pull off some variation of extended youth.

But more importantly, Tobias headed up the network of tech-savvy supernaturals who combined their efforts to help keep the existence of the supernatural a secret from an increasingly inquisitive mortal society. A mere reliance on human fallibility was no longer enough to guarantee their secrets in a digital age where even street light cameras could catch the flash of inhuman eyes. Most major cities with a large enough supernatural community had networks like Tobias' nowadays.

Scott had no idea who paid Tobias and his 'employees', but there was some income coming in from somewhere given that Tracey brought home the lion's share of the pack's living expenses. She and the rest of the supernatural shadow network spent their days working out of a small office building on the east side, scrubbing the internet and various cameras and recording devices clean of anything reported to them as being potentially problematic.

"Not a lot," Tracy admitted at last. She graduated to chewing on a lock of hair. "It was good, clean work. Professional quality, but nothing particularly hard. I could have done it myself, but I have no idea if she did it on her own, hired a supernatural hacker or outsourced to purely human ones."

Scott nodded, unsurprised. "If she knows as much about us as she seems to, she probably knows you work for Tobias. Which means she probably wouldn't have gone to him for this."

"But she's definitely old enough to be considered a major player in town," he continued. "I imagine Tobias has to have a file on her somewhere. I need you to see what you can dig up on her. If she's a hacker herself or uses humans instead of going to the Shadownet to cover her tracks, you might be able to find something. It's a long shot, but its all we have at the moment."

"What am I looking for? Anything specific?"

"Whatever you can find of her movements over the past few weeks. See if you can determine when she deviated from her usual patterns. Maybe we can figure out when and how this nogitsune made contact with her. There's more to her story about it than she told us. I want to know what it is."

"I'll do my best," she promised. Scott turned to Lucas. He worked by day as a bike messenger, again geared towards the supernatural community of New York. Many of the older creatures preferred not to venture far from their established places of power. Many of the younger creatures took part in a busy trade of black market spells and potions, artifacts and other sundry items requiring discretion and anonymous delivery.

"Yukimura had to get her information on us from somewhere. We need to know exactly who in this city knows who and where we are. People talking about a teenage Alpha bartender at Henry's is one thing - alphas as young as I am are rare but not unheard of. But someone talking about a True Alpha in town and telling her where to find me by name? We need to know who that is in case Kali and Julia do track us here."

"I'll ask around. See what I can dig up," Lucas said. "Do you want me to go to Parrish?"

"No. If he'd heard anything, he would have told Henry already, and Henry would have told us." The hellhound cop had been a valuable ally at times in the past, and his loyalty to Henry was without question.

"Are we sure Henry would have told us?" Josh asked hesitantly. Scott stared out across the harbor. He shrugged.

"If Henry's not trustworthy, we're already completely fucked no matter what we do. We might as well work on the assumption he has our back still."

"So what have you got for me?"

Josh worked down at the docks with the local siren pod. Somewhere in the previous centuries, some enterprising siren had realized that their innate abilities to enchant and obfuscate humans with their songs, their power over wind and water, stirring up storms and raising shrouds of fog and mist….all of that made for ideal smugglers. The sirens' songs clouded the minds of anyone who might get in the way of their transport of supernatural beings and artifacts in and out of the busy New York harbor. Their actual cloud cover did the rest of the work, masking things from any prying digital eyes.

Hired hands like Josh provided the supernatural muscle needed to keep their cargo secure and safeguard any potentially problematic transactions. Hopefully, now it would provide their pack with a favor.

"I don't want us unprepared in case all of this goes south," Scott said finally. "There's too many unknown variables, too many ways this could go sideways. We need an escape plan at the ready if all of this draws Kali's attention here and Yukimura can't or won't give us the help she promised. Talk to Blakeley. Start setting things up to get us all out of here by boat if we have to."

Josh blinked, wide-eyed at the implications while Tracy and Lucas exchanged glances. "Where to?"

"We've been all over the country looking for somewhere Kali won't find us or pursue us. Maybe its time we looked outside the country."

"Sixteen werewolves crossing the Atlantic smuggled in a cargo hold, with no contacts or preparation waiting on the other side," Josh said uneasily. "That's no small favor."

"And hopefully it won't come to that," Scott told them. "But if it sounds that desperate even to us, maybe it's desperate enough Kali won't consider that as our escape route, or be willing to follow us that far if she does."

The breeze picked up and whipped through their hair, carrying Diego's scent with it. The beta clambered up the fire escape, deliberately loud to give advance warning of his coming in respect for their attempts at privacy. The Calaveras scion could move even more quietly than Malia when he really wanted.

"Scott, its seven," he called out. "The others are all ready if you are."

Scott nodded and patted his three co-conspirators on the shoulders as he passed them to head back inside. "Just do your best and we'll work with what we've got."

The shitty thing about werewolf senses - even choosing not to look back didn't spare you from catching the scents of doubt and uncertainty.

Everyone else was assembled downstairs when he climbed back through the window. Brett and Liam waited with backpacks in hand, covering the whole spectrum of patience and impatience between them. The taller boy looked completely at ease, in no great hurry and without a care in the world while the smaller boy fidgeted and shifted from one foot to the other, looking like he was moments away from a bathroom emergency.

Zach, Corey, Beth and Hayden perched along the back of the couch. Carrie bounced Connor up and down in her arms over by the kitchen. Lori sat crosslegged atop a kitchen counter, playing with Brett's Iphone, oblivious to Zach's heated glare across the room at her. And Malia -

"Where's Malia?"

"She's coming," Carrie said. "I would just like to say that its probably in everyone's best interests to focus very carefully on their self-preservation instincts in the next few minutes."

Several faces scrunched up in confusion at that, including Scott's, but then the heady smell of strongly charged defensive anger preceded the werecoyote's footsteps on the stairs.

All became clear as she came into view.

The black and white laced up shoes appeared at the top of the stairs first, one foot landing angrily, holding for a pregnant pause, then the other striking with equal force. Rinse and repeat.

Then came the white knee-high socks. Then a mere inch of tanned skin before the hem of a red and black plaid skirt, carefully pleated.

The lower edges of the crimson red blazer started well below her waist, gold buttons leading up the length of her torso, flanking the crisp white blouse, fastened all the way up to her neck. Finally her face emerged from the shadows of the upper landing, hair a wild halo around her head.

Her eyes gleamed a cold, dangerous blue as she stomped the rest of the way down the stairs.

Everyone was carefully very quiet.

Then Corey squeaked and shoved a couch pillow into his face, shoulders heaving with silent laughter. Brett's lips twitched. A muttered 'better her than me' came from under Hayden's breath, and Malia's scent spiked in a prelude to violence before Scott hastily intervened.

"Okay! So! Everyone knows what they're doing, right? Zach, Corey, Hayden, Beth - you guys should start heading over to the school. I want each of you to take a different side of the campus. Brett, Liam and Malia and I will be taking the subway there."

"Ha ha!" Zach crowed. Brett's face twisted in disgust and Liam groaned.

"Seriously? But the subway stinks. Why do people all smell so bad?"

Brett nodded in vigorous agreement.

"Guys, we can't exactly go running across rooftops in our uniforms," Scott pointed out. "Showing up with sweaty, dirty clothes is not the sort of attention we want to draw."

"Why is everything about this so terrible?" Liam huffed, throwing up his arms. Scott winced. He said that now…

"There's one last thing." He reached into the backpack Noshiko Yukimura had provided him and withdrew four pendants that had come with a length note of explanation. "She gave each of us one of these to wear. Apparently, they've got some kind of charm on them to make us seem familiar to people we meet. An aura kind of thing so they just don't question why they've never seen us around before."

"You want us to wear magic?" Malia narrowed her eyes into twin slits of disbelief. He shrugged an apology.

"I'm not any happier about it than you are. But it does seem kind of necessary. Four of us can't just transfer into a private school in the middle of October without people asking questions. And that's the last thing we want."

"Yeah, but…are you sure its safe?"

He couldn't blame Brett for the question, or Liam or Malia for the wariness with which they eyed the pendants - like they were about to turn into snakes at any moment and bite them. The other betas suddenly seemed a lot less jealous of the four of them. The pack hadn't had a lot of good experiences with magic, definitely not enough to outweigh the bad. It wasn't a thing to be trusted. Scott was pretty sure he didn't trust the pendants himself. But if they were going to do this, they had to go all the way. And the potential reward was worth just about any risk…

"No, I'm not," he admitted. "But if we're going to do this, it looks like this is what its going to take. We'll be on the look out for any other strange effects they might be having, and we take them off the second we're back home safely. Okay?"

A trio of reluctant agreements sounded off, and the three of them shuffled forward to grab a pendant. Scott draped his own around his neck, tucking it beneath his tie. He waited for a tingle, a buzz or hum, some indication it was warping the physical world or having some kind of effect on him but there was nothing. That was one of the most annoying things about magic. Sometimes it was so flashy there was no missing it. Other times there was nothing to see at all, no matter how closely you looked.

"Alright. Everyone ready?"

He looked out at a sea of expectant faces, all rising as one to their feet. Mostly in unison. Not quite in harmony.

"No." That was Malia.

"This sucks." That was Liam.

"Is it too late to give my phone to Zach?" That was Brett.

"Bah!" And that was Connor, happily oblivious as he clapped in Carrie's arms. Scott ignored the tight clenching of his gut as he stooped to kiss his son on the forehead. Desperately shutting down the myriad thoughts threatening to make him call the whole thing off, wanting anything other than to leave right now. But they had a job to do. A job that was potentially worth more to them than anything else they could ever do. That would have to be enough to get him through the day.

"Alright, let's move it."

"Autobots, roll out!" Zach intoned with a fist pump. Beth sighed.

"I will push you off a roof. I swear to god."

"Try not to die," Carrie whispered to him as he brushed by, only half joking. He nodded.

"I always do."

PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPpp

It was only second period, and Kira Yukimura already wanted to go home.

The day hadn't started well. Her parents were sticking to their weeks-old routine of being completely bizarre, and her dad was turning hovering into an Olympic level sport. Her headaches were becoming increasingly Ibuprofen-resistant, and static electricity had turned her hair into a Bride of Frankenstein homage that had taken her so long to wrestle into submission she'd been late to Chemistry.

Where a strange boy she'd never seen before was sitting in her seat.

"Hi," he said brightly when she dropped onto the only stool available, right next to him. Kira scrutinized him, confused.

"Hi," she said. "Sorry, I don't think we've met. Are you new here?"

His eyes widened slightly and he shot a panicked look over her head. She followed it to a strange girl she'd also never seen before, two tables over. The brunette stared back at them with equally wide eyes before ducking her head.

"Uh no, I'm not new," he stuttered. He was clearly thrown, though Kira couldn't imagine why. It wasn't like it'd been a difficult question. Guess he was just really shy. "I've been here since school started."

"So you transferred at the start of the school year?" Kira clarified. "Did you just transfer into this class?"

How had she never seen this boy before? St. Margaret's wasn't exactly a big school. Each grade had about one hundred fifty students tops. She'd have thought she'd at least have passed him in the hallways. He was pretty cute. And wouldn't people have been talking about someone transferring senior year? That was weird, right?

"No, I've been in this class all semester," the boy insisted. Kira frowned.

"No, you haven't. Its a small class, I think I would have noticed."

"Kira!" A hand tapped on her shoulder and she turned to see her friend Daphne staring at her from the table behind them. "You're being so rude! He usually sits in the back, that's all."

She opened her mouth to contest that, because umm, no? He didn't? But a cough and a stern look from Professor Salvans at the front of the room forced her to subside. For now. Why was everyone being so weird? Was this some kind of bizarre senior prank or something?

The lecture turned into an in class assignment to recreate the phenomenon they'd just been discussing. Normally this was the kind of school work that had Kira bouncing in her seat. Yes, she was a giant nerd, who's asking? C'mon, the things you could do with a little magnesium were just plain cool. But instead of her usual partners, Kira was forced to work with a boy she'd never ever met before and who definitely was not in this class no matter what everyone else was saying, because he wasn't even looking in the right chapter in their textbooks.

After several minutes of watching him fumble with materials that were probably going to blow up half the school at the rate he was going, she took pity on him finally and snatched the hydrochloric acid out of his hand before he caused irreparable harm.

"Here," Kira sighed, switching it out for the proper additive. A smile bloomed across his face and she blinked. Mysterious enigma mystery boys should not be allowed to smile like that outside of her favorite young adult novels.

"Thanks!" He took the beaker with clear and genuine gratitude and carefully poured. Considering the resulting colorization from the combined materials was a basic chemical reaction they'd seen dozens of times before, his entranced stare was all the more bemusing. He shook himself out of it though and turned back to her with a softer grin. "I'm Scott by the way. Just to clear that up at least."

"Kira," she said back, taking his hand when he offered it for a shake. They both jumped when static leapt from her fingers to his when they touched. Ugh, not again. "Sorry, I've been getting shocked by everything lately. Guess I've absorbed enough of it to turn into a menace myself."

Scott regarded her with a thoughtful intensity that made her want to squirm. "I don't think you could ever be a menace."

"Umm, thanks I guess?" Kira fought back a blush. She was not about to be swayed by the mysterious charms of a mysterious mystery boy. Not when there was clearly a mystery afoot. "Umm, we should probably get back to work before Professor Salvans yells at us. You know how he gets."

"Yeah, good point," Scott said wryly. "I definitely don't need that today."

He turned back to the beakers and Kira frowned at his broad shoulders. That'd been a trick, mystery boy, and you just failed, she thought. Professor Salvans was all bark and no bite. He'd cough pointedly at you if you got too loud, but that was as far as he ever went. Even kids outside his class knew his reputation as a pushover.

The rest of the period passed in relative silence, with relatively less weirdness. She caught Scott whispering to himself too low for her to hear, and when she looked back at the strange girl, she was staring at Scott intently. Was she a lip reader or something? Then a few times she caught Scott glancing back at the girl, eyes on her quietly moving lips. Were they both lip readers? Was lip reading a thing taught at the school they both went to when they clearly didn't go to this one?

At the ring of the bell, Kira was out of her seat like a shot, dragging Daphne off her stool and out into the hall with her.

"Oh my god, what is with you?"

"What's with me?" Kira hissed back incredulously. "What's with you? Why are you acting like those two have been in our class before today?"

"Umm, because they have been? Seriously, what is going on, Kira? Its like I said, they usually just sit in the back. So they decided to mix it up today, what's the big deal?"

"What are their names?" Kira accused. Daphne shook her head helplessly.

"I don't know? I don't know everyone who goes to this school. Neither do you."

"No, but we know everyone in our class. And they definitely haven't been in our class since ninth grade without either of us knowing anything about them, so they have to be new and how come nobody's said anything about two new senior students all year?"

"So they've stayed under the radar, I'm seriously not getting why you're being so weird about this. They don't seem the most approachable people, maybe everyone's just been picking up on that?"

Kira looked over her shoulder and where Daphne was nodding. Scott and the other girl were standing against a far wall of lockers, watching them.

"Fine. Let's see just how approachable they really are then."

"Kira, wait," Daphne called after her, but she just squared her shoulders determinedly and marched across the hall. Scott looked wary as she approached. Good, she smiled internally. He wasn't stupid then.

"Hi, we didn't really get off on the right foot I think. Can we try again? I'm Kira Yukimura. And you are?"

"Scott Vasquez," Scott said. He pushed himself off the locker he'd been leaning against. "This is Malia Brooks."

"Scott and Malia," Kira said. "Well its nice to officially meet you both. So you guys both transferred at the start of this year, right? That's a little unusual isn't it? I mean, one senior transfer student in a school as small as ours is unexpected, let alone two."

"Oh see, we're brother and sister," Malia said. Kira raised an eyebrow, glancing back and forth between Scott's wincing face and Malia's. She didn't want to be a total bitch and say anything if there was a perfectly reasonable explanation, but…

"Half siblings," Scott clarified hastily. "Hence the different last names."

"Right, we have different moms," Malia agreed. "Same dad. Kinda. It's complicated."

Scott shot her a look. Kira's frown deepened.

"So, same dad. But different last names?"

"Our father was kind of an asshole." Scott looked like he was in actual pain as he dragged that out between gritted teeth. "Neither of us wanted anything from him, especially not a name."

Kira absorbed that, thrown by the slight ring of truth she sensed behind his conviction. Malia bobbed her head vehemently.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up anything unpleasant. I take it he's not around now?"

"Oh no, he's dead now," Malia assured her. Kira gasped and raised a hand to her mouth, and the other girl rushed on. "No, its okay, we both hated him. Like really really. Violent stabby hate. Its a super good thing he's dead."

Scott brought his palm to his face.

"I mean, not that we killed him or anything, god, I didn't mean that at all," Malia laughed, loud and fake. Kira hesitated before dragging her foot half a step back.

"So how did he die then? I don't mean to pry, but you don't seem to mind talking about it."

"It was a fire," Scott said at the same time Malia spoke. "Wild animals killed him."

They shared a look.

"He died in a fire, and then wild animals got to him. He was camping," Scott said.

"We get it a little mixed up sometimes," Malia said. "It was very traumatic for us."

Kira eyed her. "Because you hated him so much."

"Right," Malia affirmed, beaming. Beside her, Scott closed his eyes.

"Well okay," Kira said at last, voice carefully devoid of inflection. "I'm really glad we cleared up any misunderstanding. I'm looking forward to finding out more about both of you. See you in class tomorrow?"

"For sure," Scott grinned weakly. He offered a small wave as Kira backed down the hallway, her books clutched across her chest. She grinned back, just as convincingly before rounding the corner and ducking behind the wall. She strained her ears as much as she could, and maybe it was just an effect of the hallways' acoustics but for a moment it was like she could pick out their voices clear as day despite the distance.

"Well that went well." That was Scott. "Brother and sister? Really?"

"I told you I was going to be horrible at this!" That was Malia.

"It's fine," Scott sighed. His voice was fading as though headed further in the other direction. "Let's just hope Liam and Brett make better first impressions."

Kira frowned as their voices vanished entirely. Now who were Liam and Brett? Why lie about being brother and sister? And why did Scott seem to care what kind of impression they made on her?

She had no idea what was going on here, and why she was the only one who seemed to see anything weird was happening at all.

But she knew one thing for sure -

She was going to find out.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

It was after school the next day when Kira met Liam.

She didn't even have to seek him out, which was a tad disappointing if not unexpected. She'd spent the night before googling tips on how to spot a tail or someone stalking you. Then she'd gone to bed feeling paranoid and a little silly for assuming that just because something weird was up with the new kids, that it had anything to do with her specifically.

_God, Kira, the world doesn't revolve around you, I mean, right? _

Maybe 'I hope Brett and Liam make better first impressions' was just about people in general. Like, they knew people named Brett and Liam that they hoped were having better luck making friends than they had. That was far more plausible than some freaky conspiracy centered around her.

And then Liam of the mysterious 'Brett and Liam' duo showed up in the library for a tutoring session. Just when Kira coincidentally happened to be the only tutor available.

Oh reeeeeally.

Flipping her hair over one shoulder with a defiant toss of her head, she threw caution to the winds and strode across the library to where he waited at a table.

"You're Liam?"

Kira came prepared to stand firm against any possible intimidation from mysterious conspiracy stalker number three. But her resolved wavered in the face of a not remotely intimidating sophomore that couldn't be more than an inch or two taller than her own five feet and two inches. One who looked far more flustered than even she ever could.

"Uh, yeah. That's me," he mumbled, having trouble meeting her eyes. She frowned. This was not conforming to any of the scenarios she'd found online or in her Netflix queue. But then again, Scott 'I probably babysit puppies while reading to old people' Vasquez hadn't exactly oozed nefarious intentions either. What kind of spies or shadowy government agents were these?

Honestly, it was like you couldn't even trust Hollywood to prepare you for being the center of a brainwashing conspiracy at your private high school.

She'd always been light on her feet though, and she recovered quickly. Seating herself at the table and patting the chair next to her, she started pulling out her notes as she waited for him to join her.

"Great! Well, I'm Kira and it looks like I'll be your tutor this afternoon. You wrote down that you're having trouble with trigonometry? What's giving you the most problems there?"

"Umm, all of it," Liam said, frowning. He perched on the edge of his chair like he was prepared to launch himself to safety in the event of an explosion, and Kira took a discreet look around for men in black suits with tranq guns or sniper rifles.

There'd be no one to see if they were even halfway competent at their jobs, but so far Liam, Scott and Malia weren't rousing endorsements there. Unless they'd been picked because they seemed so harmless. But as she launched into her tutorial and the hour progressed, she started to think Occam's Razor might actually be in play here. Sometimes the simplest explanation was the right one. Which meant that sometimes a sophomore not having the most basic understanding of trigonometric principles meant he wasn't a super young looking secret agent pretending to be clueless, he just really didn't understand trigonometry.

Because while Kira could believe that shadowy secret agencies spying on high schoolers recruited five foot four agents with no facial hair to pose as sophomores, she couldn't fathom those agents being sent into the field with absolutely no grasp of trigonometry. It had literally dozens of real world applications.

_Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, Kira._

Eww, why had she jumped to penis metaphors?

Shaking her head at herself, she refocused and noticed Liam staring at her. He flushed, embarrassed, and it took her a second to realize he must think she was shaking her head at him.

"Sorry. I told you I'm not good at this," he mumbled.

"Oh! No no no, I'm so sorry," Kira gushed, horrified at herself. She was so caught up in her own drama, she was taking her paranoid conspiracy fantasies out on a probably innocent fifteen year old kid just trying to learn. "I was shaking my head at myself, it had nothing to do with you. You're actually doing really well, I think we just needed to come at the basic principles from an angle you can relate to better, and you'll have the hang of it in no time. It's all about having a strong foundation."

"Really?" He brightened visibly. "You're not just saying that?"

Kira smiled. How could she have ever thought this kid had nefarious intentions?

"I'm really not. You're gonna be fine, we'll just set up a few more sessions to reinforce what we covered today and make sure you've got a firm grasp of it before moving on. Is that cool?"

"Yeah, definitely. That'd be great, thanks so much!"

"Okay, well how about we stick to Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for a couple of weeks, and see how that works out?"

"Sure, whatever works for you."

"Great!"

Liam beamed at her a bit longer than was probably socially acceptable, making no move to gather up his own study supplies even as she crammed hers back into her backpack. Poor kid didn't seem to be picking up on her not so subtle cues that they were all done here, and Kira really didn't want to be so harsh as to spell it out. A sinking feeling settled in her gut as she started to suspect she'd read his obvious interest all wrong. Oh no. He didn't have like…a crush on her or something? Was it totally conceited to imagine that was what was going on here? He was cute and seemed totally adorable, but he was a sophomore - that was way too young for her - and she had a few too many things going on right now to be worrying about this.

"Umm," was all she got out as she searched for a graceful way to articulate her concerns. Why didn't they ever teach classes about this sort of thing? Talk about real world applications. Thankfully, Liam's eyes chose that moment to spring wide in realization. His face flamed red with sudden heat and he popped to his feet and shoved his books into his backpack with a haste that made her wince from a guilt slash sympathy one-two punch.

"Sorry, I didn't mean to hold you up. I gotta get going anyway, and I'm sure you've got other stuff to do," Liam spilled out as Kira regretted everything. An actual brainwashing conspiracy by shadowy government agencies would have been preferable to the boy's obvious embarrassment. She cut off the flow of apologies with a gentle headshake.

"You're fine, I just have to get going or I'll be late catching my train home. I'll see you Thursday, okay? Same time, same place?"

"Yeah, for sure. Thanks again."

"No problem," Kira waved cheerfully as she quickened her pace out of the library. At least she wasn't lying. Crap, she really was going to miss her train. She cast a look back over her shoulder as she pushed through the library's double doors. Liam still stood by the table, watching her go with his phone raised to his ear.

Her earlier concerns were initially forgotten in her mad scramble through the four city blocks between school and the nearest subway station. These shoes and this skirt were not made for that sort of thing, and inefficiently dashing through the mobs of late afternoon pedestrians took all her focus. But even with that, the irrational certainty she was being watched resurfaced as she paused for traffic before crossing a street. The tiny hairs on the back of her neck standing on end, she casually scanned her gaze across the multitudes traipsing down sidewalks in every direction. Some instinct made her look up just in time to catch a flicker of movement on the roof of a bakery a couple blocks west. A figure stood at the edge of the roof, a dark silhouette framed by the swiftly setting sun. Their features were too indistinct to make out anything like age or gender or if they were even looking in her direction at all. The crosswalk light changed to 'Go.'

Kira went, heart pounding in her chest.

She took the steps down to the station three at a time, almost colliding with a red-clad teenager at their base. She drew back, an apology ready at her lips when she took in the crimson blazer that was an identical match to her own. The boy wearing it was tall, blonde and handsome, three variables that should have combined to make him stand out in hallways of her school. Kira was positive she'd never seen him before in her life.

She was equally positive she didn't need an introduction to know his name was Brett.

Pulling away with a swiftness that startled the smile from his face, she backed away into the crowds waiting on their trains. He frowned, looking around as though uncertain how to proceed, but after a minute he started casually pressing deeper into the crowds himself. Kira darted a look down at her phone. She had two minutes til her train arrived. She wove her way through the mass of bodies, pushing further down the platform. Her mouth was dry and she was painfully aware of the tingling beneath her skin, pulsing in time with the uneasy rhythms of her heartbeat. She didn't have to look back anymore to know that he was following her further and further into the station. He was going to get on the same train as her. Her hair felt stiff and weightless all at the same time, and she just knew that if she reached up a hand to touch it right now, the strands would cling to her fingertips as though electrified. The fluorescents overhead flickered and for a moment, she stopped breathing entirely.

_Why was this happening to her?_

Despite her best efforts, the gap between them still closed far too quickly. She'd run out of room and there was nowhere else to back away to as he squeezed between an elderly couple to stand beside her. Kira could hear the train coming, the rattle along the tracks that heralded its arrival. A gust of wind rushed through the tunnel ahead of it.

"Hey, looks like we go to the same school," he said, nodding down at her own blazer with an awkward smile. "Do you usually take this train? I don't think I've run into you here before."

She said nothing as the train screeched into the station, sparks flying up from the tracks where the brakes slammed it to a halt. The doors hissed open and passengers poured out, bumping up against them on either side. More than one rubbed their shoulder where Kira brushed it, glaring back at her with confused grimaces. She barely even felt the shocks. Brett looked down at her in concern when she made no move to board the train even once the path cleared.

"Hey, are you okay?"

Heart still hammering in her chest, she took a deep breath, screwed up her courage, and shoved him as hard as she could into the crowds behind them.

"Oh my god, get away from me! Don't touch me, you pervert!"

Her screams drew every head in the station, angry murmurs gathering in a rising swell as those nearest them looked back and forth between her and Brett. He backed away, visibly panicking at all the attention aimed his way and she took the opportunity to leap aboard the train. The doors whisked shut behind her.

Making her way towards a seat at the back of the subway car, she ignored the curious glances and looked back through the windows as the train picked up speed. She could see Brett still warding off the angry accusations of the more belligerent pedestrians back on the platform, but his gaze was locked on hers even as the train sped away and he faded into a distant speck.

Before he dropped out of sight, she could have sworn there was a moment where his eyes flashed gold.

But that was just crazy, right?

Tracy Stewart really wanted to meet the person who'd invented the myth that werewolves didn't get headaches. She really did. She wanted to meet him and punch the ignorant fucker right in the face because she definitely had a headache. A boredom headache. Dear god she was sooooo bored.

She was actively engaged in illegal activities while being a supernatural creature of the night and she was bored out of her mind. That shouldn't be possible. Life had so failed to live up to her expectations. She could forgive it the years of torture, of being a freakish experiment of mad scientists who had murdered her father, but this? This betrayal, childhood fantasies of a life of adventure and mystery giving way to a reality that was 90% boredom interspersed with occasional panic attacks?

Unforgivable.

She paused the footage she was reviewing on her computer, taking a moment to reflect on her priorities. Wow. She totally just got why Scott was so worried they were all fucked up in the head.

Oh well.

Mustering her focus with a sigh, she cracked open yet another Mountain Dew and clicked play, traffic cam footage resuming its slow, tedious scroll across her screen.

"Everything alright over there?"

"Peachy keen," Tracy said without bothering to look up from her screen. Tobias hovered in the doorway, frizzy carrot-hued hair a perfect match to the Cheeto stains his fingers were leaving on the wall of her cubicle. "Some idiot hobgoblins got out of control in full view of some traffic cams last night and I'm just making sure I erased it all."

Her lie wouldn't hold up under the scrutiny of werewolf senses, but for all Tobias' brilliance, the cybermancer still was only human. As long as her tone and her level of enthusiasm never strayed far from her default setting of Absolute Boredom, he wouldn't question it. Fortunately, she had lots of actual boredom to draw upon when selling the act. Goddamn, she was so method. Just call her Daniel Day Lewis. Wait, no, just give her Daniel Day Lewis. For an older guy, he was hot. She made a mental note to see what kind of smut-fic there was of him out there. Maybe something from that movie he was in with Leonardo DiCaprio. Oh, that's pretty.

"You're the best, Trace of Bass," Tobias said. For a moment, today was almost the day she clued him in that nobody ever got anything about his references other than the fact that they were from the 90s. But then she realized that would only result in him lingering and talking to her more, and she stopped herself just in time. She liked Tobias, honestly she did. She appreciated the job he'd given her, the skills he'd taught her, his obvious intellect. It was just his presence she could do without.

"That your way of telling me I'm getting a raise, Toby?"

He laughed.

"Nah, just me respecting your awesomeness. It transcends the petty restrictions of capitalism."

"Yeah well, money transcends respect so do me a favor and think about that raise, mmkay?"

He just laughed again. "Will do. Listen, I'm getting out of here for the night and everyone else is already gone, so do me a favor and lock up when you leave, alright?"

"Five percent added to my next paycheck in recognition of the increase in responsibilities and you've got a deal," Tracy said, eyes still on her screen.

"You're ruthless."

"More than you know."

"Alright, you win. This time," Tobias said. He shook his head with a sigh. "Which of is the boss here, again?"

"I think we're still pretending it's you, but if you want to reevaluate that, I'm open to having that conversation."

"Okay, I'm out of here before my self-esteem takes a hit it can't recover from. See you in the morning."

She waved a hand over her head in acknowledgment as she listened to him shuffle down the hallway. He flicked the lights off as he went, leaving her with just the wan illumination of her own screen and the distant light in the front entranceway. The door clicked shut behind him and his footsteps faded as he reached the elevator at the end of the hallway.

"A real piece of work," she heard him mutter under his breath just before the elevator doors dinged shut. She sucked in a startled breath, feeling like she'd just been sucker punched in the chest. It wasn't the words that left her motionless in the dark, staring emptily off into space. It was the subtle affection shading them, that grudging admiration that said she wasn't what he'd expected and he appreciated her all the more for it. It was the way her father used to sound whenever she'd left him surprised, something that had happened more often than not as she reached her pre-teen years. Tracy had no illusions about the kind of man her father had been. A shallow, greedy, self-important lawyer with more than a few misogynistic tendencies that had hampered his ability to relate to her in the wake of her mother's death when she was eight. He hadn't been a particularly good father, hell, he hadn't been a particularly good man, but he'd been _hers. _

And now…

And now she was not prepared to sit in an empty office building and waste her night wallowing because her daddy was dead and oh what a poor little orphan girl she was. It'd been years. Get over it, girlfriend. She angrily wiped her face and sped up the footage onscreen. The sooner she finished this side project for Scott, the sooner she could get back to wrapping up her own actual work.

Never leave money on the table. That was one thing had father had taught her, had left her with, and she took it to heart. There were sixteen mouths to be fed at her table, after all. Scott had enough to deal with worrying about how fucked in the head they all were, let alone keeping them alive. She couldn't do anything about that, those weren't her skill-sets, but keeping them fed, that she could do.

Tracy did what she could. She didn't know how to do anything less.

She went back another day, putting her at three weeks ago. Started yet again with the cameras closest to the Yukimuras' house, waited until Noshiko's car made an appearance leaving the house and taking her into the city. Followed it through a maze of camera angles to a parking garage in one of the richer parts of town. Speaking of money…Tracy rolled her eyes. At least her cyber-surveillance had revealed one thing. Noshiko Yukimura wasn't lying about her funds. The Yukimura house and vehicles might be nothing fancy, but day by day Noshiko threw around money without a care in the world. Ugh, rich people. Her stomach grumbled and she crinkled open another bag of chips. Imagine being able to eat all the steak you wanted, every day of the week.

Yukimura emerged from the ground level of the parking garage, coming into focus on the street cams as she strolled casually down a sidewalk that took her into an upscale residential neighborhood. Upscale might have been an understatement though. The streets here were flanked by what could only be called mansions as far as she was concerned. Perfectly manicured foliage hid all but a few sparse glimpses of the houses from the prying digital eyes of Big Brother, but the size of the estates alone hinted at the kind of property values she could scarcely conceptualize.

Pausing in front of one such sprawling estate, Noshiko pulled something from her purse before pushing open a wrought iron gate and vanishing beyond the range of Tracy's cameras. She sharpened the image as much as she could, but the exact nature of whatever Noshiko had produced eluded her. Frustrated, she searched for other angles of the house, but the best she could manage was a muddied aerial view of an aged mansion well past its prime and in a state of disrepair. Returning to the main feed, she watched and waited for Noshiko to reemerge. Surprisingly, it was less than five minutes later. Visibly angry, the older woman stalked back to the parking garage at twice the speed at which she'd come from it. From there she returned home, and didn't leave for the rest of the day.

Sitting back, Tracy swiveled in her chair thoughtfully. The ceiling tiles offered no further insight than the camera footage, but there was something significant about that little excursion of Yukimura's, she was sure of it. She hadn't done anything like it on any of her other little errands in the three weeks of activity Tracy had watched, and Scott had said he wanted to know about any deviations from her usual pattern…

Reaching for her phone, Tracy dialed.

"I think I may have found something," she said as soon as Scott picked up.

"Best news I've heard all day," was his curt response. Her brow furrowed.

"That bad?"

He sighed. "This whole thing is a clusterfuck. I think we can safely say that Yukimura's magic charms are definitely not working and somehow Kira's made all of us. I don't know how, but worse, she seems pretty afraid of us. She practically got Brett mobbed to shake him off her trail."

Something in Scott's tone made her concern spike sharply. "Is he alright?"

"He'll be fine. He's just a little shaken up…a crowd of angry humans all focused on him…brought back some unpleasant memories I think."

That's what it was, that familiar edge of self-recrimination in her Alpha's voice. She closed her eyes. "You know that's not your fault, right? There's no way you could have known that would happen."

"Doesn't mean I shouldn't have known it might happen. Brett wasn't ready for this kind of thing. None of us were."

"Well we're here now anyway," Tracy said. "So where do we go from here? It's going to be pretty damn impossible to keep an eye on Kira if she's doing her best to avoid you guys. Yukimura did say if telling her the truth was the only way, go for it. Think maybe that's our best move?"

"I have no idea," Scott said after a pause. "I don't know what to do here, there's a lot more going on than we know about and it's like I can't even see half the board. How am I supposed to know what to do when I don't even know who all the players are?"

Frustration was thick and heavy in the silence that followed. Tracy chewed her lip, unsure what to say. These weren't the kind of sentiments she was used to Scott expressing to her. He unburdened himself (well as much as he ever did) on Malia and the twins, not on her.

"Well I don't know if this will turn out to be anything, but I might have a lead to check out," she said. "I've been tracing Yukimura's movements back over the past few weeks and I found something weird three weeks ago. I'm not really sure what to make of it, but it…I don't know. Something was off about it. She went to a house on the really upscale part of town, the kind of area that's so exclusive there's plenty of parking because most people don't have a reason to be there unless they're already parked in the garage or driveway, you know?"

"Okay?"

"Right, so the thing is…she could have parked there easily, but she parked like two miles away, and then walked there. She took something out of her purse when she got there, I couldn't make out what it was, and then she just strolled right in through the gate. Didn't use the buzzer or announce herself, just went right in. She came back out not even five minutes later and she did not look happy."

"Did you get anything off the address? Any connection to the Yukimuras you could find?"

"No, I checked all that, and there's nothing. No connection to that address through Kira's school, her husband's colleagues, any of Noshiko's social friends I could find. But here's the other thing. I could only get a couple of aerial shots of the house itself, but it's pretty old and rundown, doesn't match the rest of the neighborhood at all, you know what I mean?"

"We're talking about the kind of place where people care as much what their neighbors' houses look like as theirs do, huh?"

"Exactly," Tracy said excitedly. "It's weird, you know? The place looks like it hasn't been lived in since like…I don't know, but decades at least. Millionaires just don't let shit like that sit on their block and bring down the neighborhood."

"Not unless there's something telling them to leave it alone."

"Like magic."

"Like magic," Scott echoed thoughtfully. "I figured there was no way Yukimura came to us first. We had to be a last resort. Could be this is one of her friends or allies from the good old days, and when she went to them for help, they turned her down."

"Could be very useful to know why they turned her down."

"Could be," he echoed again. "Good work, Trace. Anything else?"

She winced, having put this last part off all day, and no better prepared to be the bearer of bad news than when she'd first noticed it that morning. "Yeah, but you're not going to like it."

His voice sharpened with sudden wary intensity. "Like what?"

"You know how I keep tabs on…like anyone who might be looking us, not just Kali and Julia?" Most of the pack didn't have much in the way of family, and that was a massive understatement. Orphans and runaways for the most part, only a few of them had anyone living that they'd be willing to even refer to as actual family. All of them were pretty sure Liam's parents were still alive but he wasn't exactly forthcoming. The twins didn't even know where they'd come from originally, their early childhood a haze of indistinguishable memories before their first alpha found and claimed them when they were around ten. Scott of course was infamous for keeping his own past carefully hidden from all but Malia and the twins, and they would each slit their own throats before ever betraying his confidence. A week ago, the rest of them didn't even know Scott was from a town called Beacon Hills.

So when she said anyone who might be looking for us, they both knew there was only one member of the pack anyone was looking for.

Hayden.

Once the former chimeras in the pack had found themselves free of the Dread Doctors, only Noah and Hayden felt they really had anyone worth returning to. Noah had gone for it. Hayden had not. Her fear her sister would only get hurt by association with her outweighed her hope that she could have a safe and happy life reunited with her, and Scott…well, recent revelations made it a lot easier for Tracy to understand why Scott had never fought her on that, despite his near pathological need to see the members of his pack safe and happy.

But just because Hayden wasn't looking to go home, didn't mean her cop sister ever gave up on bringing her home.

"Tracy, what is it?"

She sighed. "Hayden's sister requested time off from work this morning, went home, and booked a flight to New York."

"She what? Why?"

"I have no idea." Tracy shrugged helplessly. "I've gone over every internet search she's done in the past month from both her personal and work computers, I've hacked her phone, I've done everything I can think of, but I've got nothing."

"What do you mean there's nothing? You said you've been monitoring her investigation into Hayden's disappearance, that she was nowhere near the right track, how does she suddenly out of the blue just buy a plane ticket to our current location?"

"It's an unofficial investigation, Scott, it's completely off the books, no paperwork. I track what I can, but I have no way of knowing what she's written down by hand, who she's talked to in person. I'm telling you, there's nothing on her phone or computer to say how she suddenly connected dots to New York, I don't know how it happened!"

"Okay. Okay," he blew out a frustrated breath in an obvious attempt to de-escalate their rising tension. "I'm sorry, I know I ask a lot of you. I just…"

"It's okay. You're dealing with a lot," she said gently. "Look, maybe this is just a coincidence? Maybe she's not coming here because she actually knows something?"

"You know it's not," he said. "There's too many coincidences, too many convergences. Someone put her on the trail here, someone is pulling strings, and I have no idea if it's this nogitune, if it's Noshiko herself, if its Kali or Julia or the Dread Doctors or someone we haven't even seen coming yet."

"What do you want to do about her?"

"That's up to Hayden. I'll tell her, it's up to her to decide how she wants to handle things once her sister gets here. For now just keep track of her movements. Oh and give me that address Noshiko went to. I'll have Lucas check it out tomorrow, see if he can find out anything more."

"You're the boss."

"Any update on the twins? Everything okay with their transcripts and paperwork?"

"Ethan checked in this morning from the school, said they got through everything with the principal fine and he didn't seem suspicious. I got their class schedules lined up with a good mix of everyone you suspect to be part of this Hale pack, but they hadn't made contact with any of them yet when he called. There was a minor thing this afternoon, but I handled it."

"Shit. What now?"

"Someone hacked the school server to get a look at their transcripts and admissions paperwork, but I double checked everything myself. They shouldn't have found anything that would send up any red flags."

"Probably Danny," Scott muttered. "I should have seen that coming. So you're sure there's nothing to be worried about there?"

"Completely," Tracy assured him. "He's good, but don't worry."

There was nothing she could to do help Scott shoulder the vast majority of the burdens he carried. But she did what she could, and she knew the worth of her own skills. A lupine grin pulled back her lips, showed her teeth as she smiled.

"I'm better."

"Have you found anything yet?"

Danny grimaced and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "No Stiles, nothing in the two minutes since you last asked that. Contrary to what you seem to believe, it's not a magical mantra that makes results materialize faster."

"Hmph." The other boy flopped back into his seat as Danny's fingers resumed their energetic dance across the keyboard in front of him. "You don't need to be a dick about it."

"Maybe you could just let him work?" Lydia suggested from her seat across the library table, sandwiched between Jackson and Cora. It was always best to keep a barrier between those two. "He's only indulging your rampant paranoia as a favor, you know."

"Umm, excuse you? First off, it's not paranoia when everyone really is out to get you."

"Says the one person at this table no one is ever actually out to get," Jackson muttered, head still bent over his chemistry textbook. Stiles shot him an injured look.

"Hey, nobody's ever after Danny either."

"That's only because Danny's smart enough to know when to keep his head down. You're just irrelevant."

"Watch it, Whittemore," Cora growled from the other side of Lydia. Jackson grunted, visibly unimpressed at the implied violence and Danny heaved an internal sigh. When would Derek and his sister get that after all the shit Peter put Jackson through, he was never going to be receptive to another Hale giving him threats or commands? The only reason Jackson stuck around was a distinct lack of options. He wasn't built to be alone when he was human and he definitely wasn't built to be alone as a wolf. The fact that he was self-aware enough to recognize that was the only thing that kept him tethered near the niece and nephew of the psycho who'd bitten him and turned him into his personal killing machine.

Danny subtly kicked Stiles under the table, drawing an aggrieved glare before the other boy rolled his eyes and intervened. They all knew Cora and Jackson were perfectly willing to escalate this to actual physical conflict no matter where they were.

"Second," Stiles said, holding up his finger and continuing as though he'd never been interrupted. "Let's review precedent, shall we? Historically, mysterious strangers rolling into town has never been a random, innocent occurrence. Exhibit A - Derek Hale. 'Nuff said. Exhibit B - Allison Argent transfers to our school, later to learn she is the daughter of an elite clan of werewolf hunters. Exhibit C - the long lost Cora Hale returns to Beacon Hills…which I'm very much okay with by the way, love you babe," he finished in a rush. Cora snorted and flipped through her book, though a pleased smile tinted the corners of her lips.

"You know what all those people have in common though?" Danny asked. "They're all friends of yours now."

Stiles reared back, affronted. "Derek Hale is not my friend!"

"I mean, he's not that bad though," he clarified when Cora raised an eyebrow at him. "Look, I'm just saying! Some hiker gets murdered with a garrote - a freaking garrote of all things - and less than a week later, identical twins roar up on motorcycles wearing leather jackets and transfer in the middle of October. That doesn't strike anyone else as odd?"

It wasn't that nobody else thought it was odd so much as he just made it too much fun to needle him about it instead, Danny wanted to point out. But Lydia had that covered.

"Just to clarify, are you saying they're obviously evil because they're twins, or is it the motorcycles and the leather jackets part of that sentence that makes them evil? Because sometimes leather jackets aren't proof of moral alignment. They're just proof a hot guy can really wear them well."

"Well identical twins are still creepy," Stiles huffed. "And again, recent murder victim strangled to death by a garrotte, not even a week ago?"

"Identical twins are hot," Danny mumbled in protest. Lydia shot him an amused grin before going back to playing with her toys.

"Tell you what. You bring me the straight one, and I'll personally frisk him myself. See if I find it in his jeans or if I come across something more…taut."

"I'm not even going to dignify that with a response, because I know you're just trying to annoy me now," Stiles said loftily. Jackson grunted.

"Took you long enough."

"Anyway, my point is they're clearly evil and sleeping with them would probably make your genitals rot and turn green or something, but whatever, it's your life."

"Gross. Who's evil and why are we talking about rotting genitals?" Isaac asked as he dropped into an unclaimed seat, long legs sprawled over the side in an expression of lazy irreverence that made the librarian cough in his direction. He discreetly flipped her off and shifted position.

"Stiles thinks the new twins are evil and he's upset Lydia and Danny want to bang them," Jackson said. Isaac nodded sagely.

"Ah, the new guys? Yeah, I hate them."

"Thank you!" Stiles threw his hands up, prompting another glare from the librarian. "This is why Isaac's my favorite."

"To be fair, I hate everyone I'm not currently sleeping with. No offense," Isaac blithely continued. "But the gay one - Ethan? Ethan. Yeah, I'd do him, probably."

"Traitor."

Danny glanced up from lines of coding, intrigued despite his better judgment. "Really? That's not just a rumor then? One of them really is gay?"

If he trusted any werewolf to recognize the scents and implications of arousal, it was Isaac. He did have more sex than the rest of them combined after all, courtesy of his two girlfriends, Allison and Erica. He had to hand it to Allison - she'd turned teenage rebellion into an art form, a three pronged assault on all her parents' sensibilities at once. Want to skewer your parents' staunch conservatism? Date a girl. But nah, don't give them a chance to regroup and craft a response to your newfound gayness - date a boy too. Parents never get bisexuality. Want to skewer their over-dependency on traditional dynamics? Date both at once. Want to skewer their bigoted militant stance against the supernatural? Date werewolves. Want to really fuck with them? Do all of the above, all at the same time.

It was a thing of beauty, really. Danny considered it an honor and a privilege to have been present the day Victoria Argent discovered just who her daughter was dating. Trading shifts as Isaac and Erica's bodyguards for the next two months just in case she tried to murder them had absolutely been worth it.

"Oh for sure," Isaac nodded, shooting him a smirk. "He was totally giving you the ole' pheromone stink eye when he passed you in the hallway earlier."

Danny chose to ignore Isaac's unfortunate delivery of that sentence in order to focus on the more important aspects of it. "Really?" He asked, mouth suddenly dry. Isaac just widened his smirk.

"Danny, no!" Stiles said, aghast. "You can't date evil."

"Don't be such a prudish Quaker woman, Stiles," Lydia sighed. "Danny's not thinking about dating him."

"Also really not sure they're evil," Danny said. He leaned back in his chair and cracked his knuckles, reviewing his screen again just to see if he'd overlooked anything. "I've gone through everything I can find, and it all checks out. Aiden and Ethan Bishop, age 18, just transferred from North Carolina where their dad was last stationed. He's in the army, their mom's deceased, he's supposed to consult on some defense project in the San Francisco area and he sent them on ahead of him so they'd miss as little school as possible. I mean, it all looks legit."

Stiles frowned, clearly dissatisfied with this explanation.

"All of you shut up," Cora said, sitting up straight in her chair. They followed her gaze just in time to see the twins stroll through the library doors. "Speak of the devil…"

"See?" Stiles muttered. "Cora gets that they're evil."

She smacked the back of his head.

The twins stood framed in the doorway, drawing the attention of far more curious eyes than just their own table. Hey, they were hot leather wearing motorcycle riders after all, and you didn't need to be knowledgeable about the supernatural to see that. Wasn't like Beacon Hills High got many new students either. They were clearly aware of the scrutiny and didn't appear too happy about it, still searching for an empty table to get them out of the unintended spotlight they'd landed themselves in when Lydia took pity on them.

Well, in as much as Lydia ever took pity on someone.

"Hello, eye candy," she shouted across the room, drawing all eyes her way (along with a full on coughing fit from the aged librarian, which being Lydia, she completely ignored). "Over here!"

The twins exchanged inscrutable looks before shrugging and heading their way. Danny dropped his chin to his chest with a groan, echoed by Stiles. There was no way this was going to end well.

"Well," Lydia drawled as they neared the table. "Someone's a little conceited. I shout 'eye candy' into a crowded room and you just assume I'm talking to you?"

Brief startlement washed across both faces before one cracked open in a wide grin. "We were just taking an educated guess, but I mean, if you want us to leave…"

Lydia sighed dramatically. "Oh I don't know. You're already here and we do have two empty chairs, so I suppose you might as well stay."

"I'm Lydia," she continued as they dropped their backpacks to the table and settled into the two empty chairs, one right across from Lydia and the one who'd yet to speak seating himself right next to Danny with a smiling nod in his direction. Danny bobbed his head back in the absolute smoothest movement he'd ever managed - or at least that was what he was trying to convince himself when he caught Jackson's shoulders shaking with silent mirth. "This is Jackson, Cora, Isaac and Stiles. The strapping young gay making heart eyes at your brother is my friend Danny."

He was going to murder her.

"I'm Aiden, and this is Ethan," the more talkative brother said. "But I'm guessing you probably already knew that."

"Hmm. And there we are, back to that whole conceit problem."

"Just trying to give credit where credit's due," Aiden protested with a grin. "I mean, a girl like you is clearly at the top of the food chain. I just figured you'd be the first to know of anything new happening around here."

"Muscles and a quick tongue. I might keep this one," Lydia said. Seated right next to his ex, Jackson rolled his eyes. "You made one tiny little mistake though."

"What's that?"

Lydia leaned back, affording Aiden's hungry gaze an unobscured view of her best (well, favorite) angles.

"There is no one else like me."

Danny joined Jackson in rolling his eyes. Isaac barked out a laugh that vanished into his hand when she shot a withering glare his way.

"I think I'm going to like it in Beacon Hills," Aiden said.

"You sure? Beacon Hills is the unofficial murder capital of the world, dunno if you've heard. Lots of wild animal attacks," a new voice joined the back and forth. Both twins sat up, exchanging identical looks of confusion. Lydia sighed and glowered at an unrepentant Stiles. "What? Just think they should know what they're getting into. You guys hadn't heard?"

"No, we didn't know anything about that," Ethan said at last. "This is…common here?"

"Stiles is exaggerating," Lydia glared. "We had some problems a couple years ago but it's not always like that."

"Well not until recently," Stiles said. "But then just last week, bam, another murder. Some guy got killed with a garrotte."

"A garrotte? Like one of those wires you strangle someone with?" Aiden asked, paling. Danny was starting to get a bad feeling from this conversation. Please don't let Stiles be right…it was possible they were just freaked out hearing their new town had a murder problem, right?

"Yeah, exactly like that," Stiles said. He tilted his head. "Kinda surprised you know what that is. Most people don't."

"Our dad's in the military," Ethan cut in with a quick glance at his brother. "We know a lot about weapons."

"Ah," Stiles nodded. "Weird that he didn't hear anything about the seedier aspects of Beacon Hills before sending you out here all alone."

The brothers just smiled tightly. Nobody at the table addressed the fact that Stiles shouldn't have access to that sort of information. _Shit._

"Like Ethan said, we didn't hear anything about any deaths," Aiden said. "The only thing that came up when our dad was researching the school was a disappearance a couple years ago. A kid who ran away?"

Danny frowned, the rest of the pack mirroring his confusion.

"McDonnell or something?" Aiden said into the silence. "Mc…something anyway."

The bottom dropped out of Danny's stomach, even as Stiles' eyes narrowed into slits. Oh fuck.

"Think you got your information wrong there, buddy." Stiles' voice was an arctic wasteland, completely devoid of warmth. "His name was McCall, and he didn't run away. He was murdered."

"What?" Rocking back in his chair with a stricken look, Aiden looked absolutely poleaxed. "Are you sure?"

"I mean, of course you're sure," Ethan interjected hastily, when the expression on Stiles' face morphed from incredulity into a quiet fury. "He didn't mean it like that, it's just…we didn't know."

"No big deal," Stiles said. "Scott McCall was only my best friend."

He braced his hands against the table and stood. "Excuse me. I gotta go take a dump."

"We didn't know," Ethan repeated quietly, once Stiles had gone. Aiden was silent, staring after him with an indecipherable expression Danny had no idea what to do with. Nothing about this conversation had gone how he'd expected. "What we…we didn't hear anything about that."

"It's fine," Lydia said. "No reason you should have known."

"What did happen?" Ethan asked. "So we don't put our foot in our mouth again?"

"None of us were exactly close with him," Danny said, cautiously testing the waters of a subject that was pretty much never touched by universal agreement. At least not in Stiles' vicinity. "He and Stiles were best friends, but it was before any of us were even friends with Stiles."

"Scott's dad was an FBI agent," Lydia picked up. "The official story is this guy with a grudge against Agent McCall, someone he'd put away a long time ago, he murdered Scott to get back at his dad. Sent him a taped confession and everything, but he killed himself before they could find out what he did with the body."

"And unofficially?" Aiden asked. His eyes were dark without any of the light-hearted flirting he'd previously engaged in. That might have been painful to watch at the time, but Danny shivered now. Something told him this wasn't someone he wanted to see truly upset. "You said the official story."

Lydia spread her hands helplessly. "That's all there is. It's not something people talk about very much."

"Especially around Stilinski," Isaac said.

Aiden just nodded, absorbing that. There was an uncomfortable silence as the seven of them sat awkwardly around the table, in the wake of that utter disaster of a 'welcome to Beacon Hills' moment.

"This really isn't how we wanted our first day at a new school to go," Ethan said, shattering the quiet with a self-deprecating laugh. "I think we'd probably go before we make this worse somehow. Maybe we can try again some other time?"

"Probably a good idea," Danny said, smiling apologetically as the other boy stood. Aiden was already on his feet, staring impatiently in the direction of the doorway.

"Tell your friend we're sorry," Aiden said before they turned to go. "We didn't mean to stir up bad memories. It was…careless of us."

"We'll try," Danny said diplomatically. "I can't promise anything though. Scott is a pretty sore subject where Stiles is concerned."

Aiden just nodded, his gaze still dark and intense. "I understand. Some friends are worth holding a grudge for."

And with that the brothers made their exit, leaving the pack to shuffle uselessly through notes and texts none of them had any interest in while they waited for Stiles to return. Danny let his mind wander to a time back before any of them knew about the supernatural, when they were all just a bunch of dumb freshmen focused on sports and popularity. Scott had just been this quiet, dopey kid he noted in passing, nobody you really paid attention to unless he was in the midst of an asthma attack. He'd been nice though, always with a friendly smile or a shy laugh even if you weren't friends with him and just happened to interact in one of those rare moments when you weren't being a dick obsessed with high school social status.

It was unfortunate, Danny acknowledged, that it took being murdered to make people realize they'd totally overlooked someone's worth while they'd actually been around. He was painfully aware that if Scott McCall had lived to his senior year, they probably still would have never interacted beyond the occasional 'what's up' as they passed each other in the halls. But some sicko with a grudge murdered him to get back at his dad and now the rest of them sat around years later thinking 'oh he deserved better' like they had any right to pretend they knew what he did or didn't deserve? It felt dishonest.

Sometimes Danny wondered if the reasons no one talked about Scott in Stiles' presence were really for Stiles' sake, or for their own.

They all looked up cautiously as Stiles dropped back into his seat, but none of them were stupid - brave? - enough to ask if he was alright. Luckily - strategically? - Stiles had never been one to let a silence linger too long.

"So we all agree they're evil now, right?"

The rest of them exchanged glances.

"Stiles, I think you're still assuming a lot," Lydia ventured. "They seemed pretty sincere to me."

"Were we watching the same conversation? You all saw how they reacted when I brought up the garrotte right? They knew something."

"It's possible they knew something," Danny said, conceding. They definitely had…reacted. But what that reaction meant was still open to interpretation. "They could have just been freaked out though."

"Well I say we need to know for sure," Stiles said stubbornly. "Since you and Lydia already want to get close to them, we might as well use that to our advantage and see what you can learn from that."

Danny's eyes narrowed but he bit his tongue before he could say anything. He knew Stiles was just being especially prickly right now because he felt vulnerable. Didn't make it okay, but it didn't make this the right moment to confront him about it either.

Lydia was not so understanding.

"Ten minutes ago, you freaked out at the idea of me and Aiden. Now you want to pimp me out?"

"It was just a suggestion," Stiles said, undeterred by the icebergs in her own tone. "Lives are at stake and all that, right?"

Lydia stared him down, neither breaking their gaze away, not even when the bell rang and everyone else in the room made moves to gather their things and head to their next class. Finally, Lydia smiled.

"Fine. But if we really want to get some answers out of them, we'll have to bring our A game. Some nachos at the bowling alley are hardly going to cut it. Since Danny and I are doing this for the pack, really, I'm sure you can convince Derek to loan us that black AMEX card he thinks we all don't know he has."

Stiles' jaw worked up and down and he glanced over at Cora, who just snorted. "You're on your own there."

"Fine," he bit out. "I'll see what I can do."

"Great, can't wait," Lydia smiled. "If you'll excuse me, I need to go find Allison and Erica and consult on my wardrobe. I'm thinking something in red, but second opinions never hurt."

She swept out of the library, an amused Isaac trailing in her wake. Cora made her own way to the door, and Jackson looked back, quirking an inquiring eyebrow at Danny when he lingered by the table. He waved his friend off; he'd catch up with him later. Jackson hesitated, looking back and forth between Danny and Stiles before shrugging and wandering off.

"You need something, Danny?"

Danny hesitated, his usual confidence failing him. He had no idea how to broach this particular subject, especially after years of studiously avoiding even the attempt just for the sake of convenience. But it could only be danced around for so long.

"Look, I'm not going to insult you by pretending I know what losing Scott felt like for you. I don't. But I do know you, and while all of us might be pretty dysfunctional friends, I'd like to think we are still friends."

Stiles froze, tension visibly stiffening his shoulders and holding him locked in place in the midst of cramming his books back into his backpack.

"This have a point?"

"You had your reasons for being suspicious of the twins from the start, and I respect that. Maybe they do know something about that recent murder. But we know from Derek, from Allison, from Cora - even if they are connected to the supernatural and are keeping secrets, that doesn't automatically make them the bad guys."

"Fine," Stiles practically snarled. "What does any of that have to do with Scott?"

"It has to do with the fact that Lydia's right. Ten minutes ago you didn't want me or her to go anywhere near them. Now you're ready to pay for our dates yourself, just to pump them for information. You know the only thing to change between then and now? They brought up Scott."

The other boy looked away.

"You don't cope, Stiles," Danny sighed. "You never have. It's not something you do. Something happens that you don't want to deal with, and you do anything else to avoid facing it. You repress, you distract yourself, you pick a fight…whatever it takes so you don't have to confront it. And god help anything that gets in the way of that. You may have been suspicious of the twins already, but then they made you remember Scott, something you've been doing your best to avoid doing for years. And now they're not just suspects anymore, they're the Enemy, and you're off on some crusade to make them pay for that crime."

"That's not fair," Stiles said, his voice coming out tight and strangled. He stared fixedly at a point on the wall, mouth set in a grim line.

"No, it's not," Danny acknowledged gently. "But I notice you didn't say it wasn't true."

Feeling like shit, he turned and walked away.

_A cute boy smiled at me at school today,_ he thought to himself as he wandered the hallways to his next class. _And now when all I want to do is ask him out for real, I get to pretend and manipulate him just in case he's some kind of supernatural killer. And then I rubbed my friend's dead BFF in his face, because he doesn't get to be a real teenager and waste years coping in an unhealthy but totally valid way, not when there are people being murdered and it's somehow our responsibility. All this before two o'clock on a Tuesday._

He's barely eighteen, Danny reflects. When did it get so hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys?

And how were you supposed to ever be sure which one you really were?

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Don't worry, all will be revealed as to why Scott and those in Beacon Hills have very different ideas about what happened when he disappeared, as will how his absence altered the way events unfolded in Beacon Hills.


	5. Chapter 5

A/N: This is where things start to get pretty dark. I've touched on certain elements lightly in previous chapters, but this is the first chapter where we really start to delve into certain events and the effects they've had on the characters. Basically, every single one of Scott's pack is pretty screwed up, with a whole host of trauma in their past, and none of them are remotely equipped to healthily deal with the things they've been through. Troubled teens being troubled without an adequate support system is a major theme of this fic, so I'm not going to be skimping on how things are addressed and touched on. Trigger warnings for references to/discussion of rape, torture and underage prostitution definitely need to be applied from here on out.

Chapter 5

"Wait, I'm what?" Scott asked, staring at the phone in his hand.

"Dead," Aiden supplied again. His tone was way too cheerful to be informing someone they'd been deceased for three years. Dick. "Or so the story goes, anyway. There was a funeral, the whole nine yards. You even have a grave. An empty one, I guess. Do you want us to go check it out, or would that be too weird? I mean, I was going to -"

"Aiden," Scott interrupted. Head spinning, he sat heavily on the ledge ringing the perimeter of the loft's roof. His eyes stared unseeing out at the harbor, seeking an anchor somewhere in the swells rolling across the surface of the water. People said focusing on one fixed spot could help you keep your balance, but there was no foothold to be found in the chaos of the sea. Not that it would have worked anyway. Nothing Scott ever did seemed to work the way it was supposed to. "Why would they think I'm dead? I left a note."

A note that didn't explain much, he supposed, but still, it's not like it was a suicide letter or anything…

"Yeah, they didn't get it. Three guesses what happened there."

"Peter."

"That's what we're thinking. The hunters were already in town investigating his kills, right? Which looked like animal attacks. And he probably knew his nephew was on his way too. But then you totally screw up his plans by skipping town, and that's not something that was going to go unnoticed, not with your dad being an FBI agent and everything."

"What does my dad have to do with it?" Scott asked, startled. "I don't think Peter even knew he was still in the picture."

"He must have," Aiden said, his inflection conveying the shrug he was no doubt making on his side of the phone. "Because that's what everyone thinks happened…some psycho he put away years ago killed you to get revenge. Even made a video confession. Bet you anything Peter was behind that camera, scaring that dude shitless until he said whatever he wanted him to say. And then he killed him and made it look like a suicide before the cops could get there."

"With a confession from someone with a motive, nobody was going to look further, even without a body. And no chance of connecting my disappearance to Peter, since his MO was always to make things look like an animal attack," Scott realized.

"That's what we figured too. Obviously he had plans to handle his nephew and the hunters who were looking for him, but the FBI digging into his murders, trying to figure out what had happened to you? That could have fucked everything up for him."

"Jesus," Scott swore. He rubbed at his face with one hand, trying to knead the tension out of it. Relief eluded him even there. It'd been bad enough imagining his mom trying to understand what could have made him leave, sitting in his room just waiting for him to come home. It was another thing entirely to picture her crying at his own goddamn funeral, taking flowers to his grave…god, Stiles probably visited his grave, even knowing there was nothing buried under his tombstone. Was it in the same cemetery his mom was buried in? There weren't many burial options in a town as small as Beacon Hills. Nausea churned in Scott's belly.

And what about the Facebook pages Stiles had set to public? He'd always assumed it was his friend's way of reaching out to him wherever he was, making sure he had a way to communicate if the urge to click on that message button and just type 'hey' ever became too great to resist. But unless Stiles had meant the pages to reach out to the Great Beyond, that had never been the point at all. Way to assume it was all about him, Scott reflected ruefully. Guess sometimes a Facebook page is just a Facebook page.

God, what about his dad? He'd barely thought about him in all this time, he'd gotten so used to the man's absence in his life. But believing his son was dead because of him, because of someone who wanted to hurt _him_ \- Scott had never actually thought his dad was so uncaring that even he would be unaffected by something like that. Was he drinking again? Was there anyone Scott had left behind who wasn't hurting because he was a stupid, reckless idiot who didn't know what the hell he was doing?

"Have you seen her yet?" He asked at last. No need to specify who the 'her' was. Aiden answered with silence, stretching into almost half a minute.

"No, not yet," he said at last. "Ethan's headed to the hospital later today to poke around. He's going to check in on her then. Is there anything you want him to keep an eye out for, anything you want him to say or do whatever?"

"No. No, just-," Scott rubbed tiredly at his face some more. "What about Stiles. How is he?"

"Bitter. Angry. Suffering from bad acne."

"Aiden."

"Sorry," Aiden said with a resounding lack of apology in his voice. Scott didn't know why he'd assumed his two friends being in the same zip code would result in anything other than catastrophe. "Just saying, he seems like your average teenager hanging out with werewolves who could all snap him in two, and overcompensating for it. Course, mention your name around him and he turns into the Siberian tundra, so…there's that."

"Pretty sure he went to sleep last night plotting a hundred different ways to kill me and hide my body," Aiden mused after a pause for reflection. "I mean, not that he could, let's be real. I'm an evolutionary masterpiece and he's like…one hundred thirty pounds. But y'know. Points for intensity."

"Do you think I did the right thing?" Scott blurted it out, unable to contain himself any longer. The flow of words spilled out of him, like a dam crumbling under the onslaught of floodwaters breaking free. "Should I have stayed? If I'd turned around, or just given it a couple weeks…or…or what if I'd told him, or his dad, or my dad, or just lasted a little bit longer until Peter's nephew got there -"

"Scott. Scott! Listen to me, you can't do that, man. You'll drive yourself crazy that way. Honestly? I don't think there was a right thing to do there. I think you were fucked either way, and you did what you thought was best at the time. You can second guess it all you want, but that doesn't mean it was ever going to turn out any better. And personally, speaking as the selfish bastard who'd still be in a cage being picked apart by mad scientists if you'd never left Beacon Hills, I'm pretty glad you did."

"You don't know that," Scott protested feebly. "You could have escaped eventually without me. Maybe even with Theo."

"And you don't know that," Aiden countered. "Maybe we could have, maybe we'd have been worse off. Maybe we were going to lose Theo either way."

"Yeah well, you definitely wouldn't have had to deal with Kali and Julia if it weren't for me," Scott said stubbornly. "Me and my fucking True Alpha bullshit."

"Okay, and what about Brett and Lori and Carrie? Kali would still have gotten her claws in them. Or Liam? He'd still be turning tricks on the streets. And Tracy and Josh and the others would still all be in the Dread Doctors' lab if you hadn't convinced us all to go back looking for Theo. I can do this just as long as you can."

He opened his mouth to argue the point further anyway. Hesitated. Aiden sensed the opening and played his trump card.

"What about Connor? You never left Beacon Hills, he's never born. As shitty as it was how all that went down, are you telling me that's really what you want?"

The nausea in Scott's belly reignited with a fury, chasing the bile up his throat like a flame following lines etched in gasoline. How could he possibly answer that? How could he even begin to admit to the one person who came close to loving Connor as much as he did - how could he tell him about all the times he'd woken up to the sound of his son crying and just lain there. Staring at the ceiling, silently praying Connor would just stop on his own. Unable to get up, unable to cross the room to his crib for fear that this would be it, this would be the time he'd finally look down and see her face laughing back up at him instead. How could he admit that sometimes he had to take a breath and steel himself before picking up his own kid. Afraid that touching him would resurrect phantoms that defied all attempts at exorcism. Fingertips ghosting up and down his torso, just the pads teasing him ever so lightly before becoming curved and razor-tipped. Slashing him open until his skin was hot and sticky beneath the stain of his own dried blood. Her breath a whisper of menace laced with amusement as it traced a path along the arch of his neck to up behind his ear.

How sometimes, when looking into his son's golden eyes, he was overwhelmed with so much hatred, more than he'd ever imagined he could have within him, not at Connor, fuck no, he loved his son, he did, he loved him so much but god he hated his son's mother more than he'd ever hated anything in his life. And they were so intertwined, so intricately connected he couldn't separate the two no matter how hard he tried…and he tried, and the more he tried, the more he felt like he was being physically pulled apart. There were hooks embedded beneath his skin, tethered to emotions pulling him in every direction. Each day ripping him further and further until one day there'd be nothing left to hold him together at all, and not even werewolf healing could stitch nothingness back together again.

How could he even begin to say any of that to Aiden, when just saying it to himself left him gasping for air, caught in the throes of an asthma attack that would never fucking _stop_?

"Scott? Scott! Are you there?"

Aiden's panicked voice finally cut through the bloody haze fogging his view of the afternoon air around him. From the sound of it, he guessed his friend had been trying to get his attention for some time now. Clamping down on his runaway emotions, Scott reined his labored breathing back into its normal rhythms. One lungful of oxygen at a time. He looked down to see the hand not holding his phone had turned into a fist full of claws. He was gripping the ledge so tightly it'd crumbled between his fingers and painted them gray with their dust.

"Sorry, I got distracted for a minute," Scott said hoarsely. He swallowed, forcing saliva to wet his parched throat. To another werewolf's ears, the lie couldn't have been more obvious. Aiden let it pass without comment.

"So how are things going over there anyway?" He asked instead. Scott leaped at the segue like a dying man grasping at salvation. Sometimes it was good to remember why their firm insistence on not talking about shit was exactly what they needed.

"Terrible. Kira's freaked out and won't let any of us near her. Not that I blame her."

"You need to tell her the truth, sounds like."

"I know," Scott sighed. "It's just a matter of how. How do I get her to trust me, that I'm only trying to look out for her because her mother was worried for her safety…when I don't trust that her mother's remotely concerned about what happens to me and my pack in the process?"

"You still think she's hiding something?"

"I know she is, I just don't know if it's something that's actually going to bite us in the ass. I believe her when she says her daughter's safety is her only priority, but that doesn't mean _we're_ anything other than expendable to her. And without being sure, how am I supposed to be like 'oh hey, you should totally trust me with your life because your mother loves you very much, but also, the second your mom tries to screw us I'm putting my pack first so don't trust me too much, got it?'"

"Yeah," Aiden said with an audible wince. "See, this is why I'm glad you're the Alpha and I don't have to figure out these kinds of things."

Scott exhaled. "You suck."

"Nope, that's my brother. I lick."

"You're disturbed."

"Wasn't hugged enough as a child. Plus the whole thing where I was tortured and experimented on. Nyah nyah."

Scott laughed. "I miss you, loser."

"Gross. You're getting my emotional barriers all wet with your weepy manchild tears. Pull yourself together, dude. I'm embarrassed for you."

"I'm hanging up before I compromise your fragile masculinity any further."

"It is very delicate. Dainty, even."

"You're a freak," Scott said, affection inescapable even with three thousand miles between them. Why had he thought sending the twins away was a good idea? "Be careful out there."

"Eh, only the good die young," Aiden said dismissively. "Talk to you soon, O alpha, my Alpha."

He hung up before Scott could dwell too long on his parting shot. He wasn't wrong. In their mutual experiences, it was always the good ones who went first.

That was exactly what had him so worried.

Dusting his hands off on his jeans, Scott clambered down the fire escape and swung through the open window. Diego, Carrie and Beth were clustered around the kitchen. Everyone else was…preoccupied.

Scott closed his eyes. "Please tell me Zach isn't doing what I think he's doing."

Standing on the landing at the top of the stairs, the young beta held a giggling, squirming Connor raised in the air high over his own head. Lori, Tracy and Hayden were sprawled across the couch below, scents thick with amusement. Josh sat at the piano while Brett and Liam lounged on the stairs.

"Nants ingonyama bagithi Baba!" Zach sang out in a voice puberty had not been kind to.

"Okay," Carrie reported dutifully from Scott's side. "Zach definitely is not using your son and our future Alpha as a prop to reenact the Lion King."

He sighed.

"There's far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be fooooooooound," Zach sang. Josh's fingers flew across the ivory keys of the piano, seeking a chord progression that could minimize some of the damage the younger boy was doing to innocent eardrums. Thank god one of them had actual musical talent.

"He's skipped three whole verses," Beth said, arms crossed and face skewed in judgment. Diego shrugged and slurped a spoonful of cereal from the bowl in his hands. Beth's judgment shifted an exact 45 degrees to face him head on. "Do you have to do that?"

Diego took another deliberate slurp, just a little louder. _The one time scion of a revered hunting clan, ladies and gentlemen._

"It's the Cirrrrrcle of Liiiiiife. And it moves us allllllll."

The girls were swaying on the couch now, singing along. Brett and Liam were doing high kicks up and down the stairs. They looked absolutely ridiculous. Despite himself, the corners of Scott's mouth twitched ever so slightly upwards.

"Why is everyone always going on about this movie?" Diego asked, watching the scene unfold in front of them with a critical eye. "I don't see the appeal."

"You've never seen the Lion King?" Carrie turned towards him in surprise. Beth sniffed.

"He's from Mexico, Carrie. The whole world doesn't revolve around American cinema."

Diego shot her a bemused look. "We watched American movies all the time. Just not Disney ones. Hunter family, remember?"

"Oh," Beth said, visibly deflating. Carrie covered her laugh with a cough.

"Till we find our plaaaaaaaaace, on the path unwiiiiiiinding."

In that moment, Scott couldn't find it in himself to regret a single choice that had led to where he was standing. Pack _was_ family. Pack was for life.

"It's the cirrrrrrcleeeeee, the circle of liiiiiiiiiiife."

Zach bowed his neck, with Connor raised as high into the sky as he could reach. In the wake of the music, only the baby's rampant babbling broke the silence. Scott raised his hands and began a slow, steady clap.

Zach's head jerked up, eyes gleaming gold in a sudden panic as he noticed Scott standing by the window for the first time. He yanked Connor close to his chest, looked at him, looked over at his Alpha. Looked back at the baby in his arms. "This isn't what it looks like."

Scott just shook his head, a single eyebrow raised over a slowly spreading smirk.

Whatever games Noshiko was playing, whatever Ethan and Aiden found in Beacon Hills, it didn't matter. There would not be another Theo. Another DeMarco. He wasn't about to lose anyone again. Not to this nogitsune, not to Kali.

For better or worse, he was the Alpha, and a true Alpha protected his pack.

Whatever it took.

One a scale of 'one' to 'ominous', Lucas rated the mansion in front of him an easy 'this place is possessed as fuck and the curtains are probably gonna murder me.'

He easily vaulted over the top of the brick garden wall. Landed in a crouch between bushes of pink and purple azaleas in desperate need of a pruning. Regarded the green shuttered windows gaping at him from both sides of the front door like some fucked up ghost face guarding the entrance way to hell. Regretted everything.

"I could have gone pro," Lucas told the house mournfully, longing for the days when all he had to worry about was making the Varsity soccer team as a freshman. Predictably, the house gave no fucks. He kicked some gravel from the garden path in front of him as he eased around the side of the structure, keeping a watchful eye out for any movement from within. Nothing but the wind stirring the lace curtains in the upper story's windows. Fucking possessed murder curtains that were gonna strangle him. Man, why did he always get the shit jobs?

The bushes rustled behind him and he rolled his eyes.

"You coming in with me or are you gonna wait out here?"

"How'd you know I was following you?" Corey pouted, popping up alongside him. Lucas' lips caved under the weight of a tolerant smile.

"You're not actually able to turn invisible anymore, remember? Plus, there's those."

He nodded down at the eye-searing white and gold sneakers adorning his boyfriend's feet. Corey brightened and gave a little twirl.

"Oh yeah, you like them? They're new."

"I noticed," Lucas said dryly. "Where'd you get them?"

"Brett and I went shopping the other day," the younger boy hedged, wilting slightly when Lucas shook his head. Going shopping with Brett was code for exercising the five finger discount with the help of a little supernatural speed and enhanced senses. Shame wasn't a look Corey had ever worn particularly well though, and his defenses kicked in a few seconds later. "Hey, I'm about to risk life and limb to go into a creepy haunted house. I deserve nice things."

"Nobody said you had to come," Lucas pointed out. "Actually, nobody even suggested it."

"I am _trying_ to have a heroic moment here and you're ruining it."

"You were bored and the TV and all the laptops are already being used at home," he translated. Corey shrugged.

"That too."

That deserved another eye roll. Lucas indulged himself. Sobered as he turned to face the house again, where it lurked darkly against the backdrop of the softly spreading twilight. Shadows deepened and reached grasping fingers across the lawn even as they stood there. It definitely wasn't going to get any less creepy the longer they waited.

"Maybe you should stay out here," he said, unable to shake the chill tap-dancing up and down his spine. It's just a house, he told himself sternly. Then laughed. Cuz he was just a kid, right? Welcome to the supernatural, where literally anything can kill you. Fuck his life. "I don't have a good feeling about this place."

Corey looked skeptical. "When do you have good feelings about anything?"

"When I'm with you," the older boy teased, bumping his boyfriend lightly with his shoulder. Corey flushed, pink staining his cheeks.

"That was so lame," he muttered. "Well, now I have to go in the creepy murder house with you. Ugh, let's just get this over with."

"Wait, what? No, that wasn't what I - ah hell," Lucas swore. He had to jog to catch up with Corey's brisk pace as the other boy walked resolutely up to the front of the house.

"Are you crazy? Don't use the front door," he hissed. Corey looked back at him with his patented 'don't make me request your IQ score' expression. One of them, anyway. He had like five.

"Why not? It's unlocked," he said, twisting the door knob for emphasis. The door creaked inward with a squeal of protest from long un-oiled hinges.

"Well yeah, but - subtlety."

It was Corey's turn to roll his eyes. "It's not like there's anyone home. Besides, if the house is going to eat us anyway, do you think it really matters if we go in a window or the front door?"

Well. That was a good point.

He slipped through the door behind his boyfriend and let it ease shut behind him. Even with a werewolf's keen night vision, it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness inside.

They stood in a massive indoor courtyard, lined with balconies where the second story overlooked the interior space. Cobwebs and ropes of ivy hung from the massive wooden beams, the leaves dried out, brown and decayed in death. Lucas brushed a strand out of his way as he edged further into the house. A few leaves shook loose and drifted down to the tiled floor, crunching beneath his feet.

A large stone fountain dominated the center of the courtyard, illuminated by a few faint sunbeams left over from the dying day. They filtered down through a skylight up above, dancing across the walls, spotlighting the once white paint now yellowed with age. Lucas was no architectural prodigy, but he couldn't help but feel that the whole scene was a mish-mash of different styles and decades that had no business coexisting in such a chaotic jumble. It left everything tainted with a vague sense of wrongness, the lack of symmetry feeling less a symptom of incompetent design and more…deliberate. As though to evoke unease.

Something about the fountain raised the hair on the back of his neck, and fisting his hands in his hoodie, he crept closer for a better look. Rust stained water still trickled down from the spout at the top, but that wasn't what had drawn his attention. It was the art, the figures carved into the stone edifice, lithe bodies contorted in strange configurations. Their hands had too many fingers. Their knees bent in the wrong directions, their spines were arranged in positions that were either inhuman or extremely painful. Some of the figures had horns curving out from their foreheads. Others had antlers.

All had faces etched in agony, eyes wide and mouths open in silent screams.

Ripples in the water caught his eye, and he peered down in spite of his better judgment. Light played around the edges of the fountain, a soft glow that had nothing to do with the skylight overhead. He could half-glimpse images reflected in the water, ethereal figures dancing, their movements more hinted at than actually visualized, always just slightly out of focus.

"We need to go," Lucas whispered, tearing his eyes away with no small effort. "Corey, we need to go right now."

"I don't think we can."

He pivoted to see the stricken look on his boyfriend's face. Followed his eyes back in the direction they'd come. The door they'd entered through should have been no more than ten feet behind them. It might as well have been ten thousand. The courtyard stretched impossibly into the distance, the door an illusive trick of the eye at the furthest range of even his supernatural vision.

Shit.

"Luke. Lucas!"

Tugging on his sleeve, Corey drew his attention back towards the depths of the house. The fountain was gone. The second story balconies were gone, hell most of the walls were gone. A fog-shrouded forest grove took their place, massive trunks reaching up towards what should have been the ceiling, but now was only empty shadows. Intricate root systems grew out of the few walls that were left, woven together to form tangled knolls, delicate silver-petaled flowers randomly spaced throughout the undergrowth. The leaves overhead were green and gold, limned with their own faint radiance, and fireflies flitted through the air all around them. Everything was heavy with the intoxicating scents of a primal forest unspoiled by man, all musk and loam and the fragrances of the foliage. The part of Lucas he thought of as his wolf side stirred restlessly inside him. A glance at his suddenly restless boyfriend said he probably felt the same.

In the deepest shadows between two imposing trunks, roots and branches had conspired to form a giant throne, looming large against the far wall of what should have been just a house. The man sitting on that throne, chin in hand and elbow propped upon his knee as he regarded them - he was the strangest thing of all.

Clad in an elegantly tailored black suit and tie, he should have looked completely out of place upon his forest throne. Instead, it was like nature warped to accommodate the modern, corporate style of attire, making allowances so that the way the shadows fell upon him, the way the fireflies lit his face, everything about him looked like he was exactly where he belonged. His skin was so pale it was practically moonlight, but there was a subtle wrongness to it. Too smooth, too flawless. Without the blemishes or sparse imperfections that kept skin from looking untouched. Unreal. Artfully disheveled black hair was crowned with a simple golden circlet, a single emerald centered atop his forehead. His eyes watched them with clear amusement; black and gold, but slitted like a cat's.

"You can come closer, little wolves," the man said at last. His voice was somehow both as natural and unnatural as the rest of him, nothing remarkable about the slight baritone other than the way it managed to fill the whole space, echoing around them despite the utter lack of acoustics. "I assure you, you're far more likely to bite than I am."

Yeah, that wasn't actually reassuring. Lucas had only met a couple of Fae before, but it only took one to know when you were in the presence of the Fair Folk. But those brief encounters had been nothing like this one. This was one of the old ones. He was confident of that. Even if he was unsure about anything else…that he could be certain of. This Fae was old as fuck.

They were so screwed.

"Who are you?" Corey managed to get out, though Lucas wasn't sure how. His own voice still eluded him. Forward momentum, however, did not. Something pulled him deeper into the grove, no matter how much the human in him screamed out in the name of self preservation. He'd never felt his wolf nature as keenly as now. It was like an entirely separate creature buried in his skin, pushing him forward whether he liked it or not.

He very much did not, just FYI.

"You're the ones who trespassed in my domain," said the Fae, humor evident in every plane of his face. "Shouldn't that be my question?"

"You seem to already know the answer to that," Lucas gritted out, finally finding his tongue. "And I didn't see your name on the lease."

An elegant eyebrow arched. "You saw the lease?"

Man, they really weren't kidding when they said the Fae loved their games. Word games included, apparently.

"Who are you?" Lucas repeated Corey's question stubbornly. If you just chose not to play, there was nothing they could do about that right?

The man leaned back on his throne, fingers drumming against the armrest.

"Names are whatever we choose them to be and mean just as little. I have many names. Alberich. Arawn. Finnrava. Cernunnos. I can't imagine knowing those changes anything for you."

Yeah, apparently just not playing wasn't going to be an option.

"What are you then?"

The Fae raised a slim hand before him and considered the large opal ring adorning his index finger. "Lord of Leaf and Shadow," he decided at last. "Very old. Very bored. Have you come to entertain me?"

"Not sure I'd be any good at that," Lucas said. It was probably a good idea to not let the condescending prick with the power to conjure forests out of thin air get to him. Yeah, should probably focus on that. "Never did get the hang of juggling."

Alberich or whatever the fuck just laughed. "The human in you wants to run away. The wolf in you wants to run to me. And yet you do neither, and respond with wit. How can that be anything other than entertaining?"

He'd been going more for defiance there, so, you know, fuck you dude.

"You're who Noshiko Yukimura came to meet a few weeks ago," Lucas said, pressing on. It was the only thing he could think to do. He could smell Corey's fear beside him. He was pretty sure he reeked himself, but as long as he kept the Fae Lord's attention on him, well…okay, he wasn't actually sure that would accomplish anything, but it was something to do. So. Doing it.

"Noshiko," Alberich said thoughtfully, propping his chin back in his hand. "An old friend. What of it?"

"What did she want? Was it about the nogitsune?"

The Fae shrugged. "She did mention Akio was up to his old tricks again. Terrible nuisance that one. Thinks he's oh so clever, but he's actually a very droll fellow. Not at all creative."

Akio? Was that the nogitsune's name? Lucas could have kicked himself. Why had none of them even thought to ask if he had a name? This Fae could say whatever he liked, but it was a lot easier to fight something with a name than some vague undefinable menace. He thought back to the footage Tracy had shown him. What else could he mine out of this guy, as long as he was being forthcoming? And you know, didn't turn them into rabbits on their way out the door or whatever?

"But you didn't help her," Lucas said. He remembered the kitsune's angry steps, retracing her way back to her car.

"Regrettably, she was unable to meet my price."

"You said she's your friend."

He laughed again. "She is. Never let that be a reason to do something for free, boy. It sets a bad precedent."

"You didn't send her away empty-handed though, did you?" Lucas asked. Playing a hunch. His dad had been a gambler. When he was a kid, Lucas would use to sit at the top of the basement stairs, watching as his father hosted a weekly poker game with men Mom forbid him to let in the house. He knew what it looked like when someone was running a long con. This dude might think he's slick, but centuries old or not, he wasn't any different than the card sharks huddled around Dad's poker table under a low-watt fluorescent light. "You weren't surprised to see us here, because you're the one who told her about our pack. About Scott."

Alberich just smiled and spread his hands. "Well. As you said. She is a friend."

"How'd you even know about Scott?"

"I'm Lord of Leaf and Shadow, boy. The woods keep no secrets from me."

Lucas nodded, taking a step back. Trying to see all the angles. Noshiko came to this guy for help. He won't help her, sends her away. But to Scott, who will help her. Scott doesn't trust her though, so they come knocking on this guy's door. That was the sequence of events, that was the full circle. What'd it mean though? What was the point?

"Noshiko couldn't meet your price," he said. "So you wouldn't help. But you'd help if someone did meet your price, right?"

The Fae steepled his fingers, eyes alight with excitement. He was enjoying this way too much for Lucas' comfort. "You have nothing I want, little wolf."

"Just me? Or does that go for everyone in my pack?"

There was silence for a time then, as Alberich sat back and regarded the empty air, an absent smile playing across his lips. Lucas chanced a glance at Corey; his eyes gleamed gold and his whole body vibrated with tension. He wasn't sure what about this Fae or this place was making their wolf sides react this way, but neither of them could take much more of being here. He frowned, tilting his head to follow the hint of darker hues at the edge of his vision. It was the weirdest thing. When he looked straight at the trees, their leaves were green and gold. But when he looked out of the corner of his eyes, they were black and purple, the fireflies malformed little creatures with wings the color of dried blood. He shivered.

"A True Alpha," Alberich said at last. He scratched at his chin. "A novelty like that grants a certain…cachet. It's been a very long time since the last of those. I'd honestly started to think we'd never see another one."

Lucas bristled. Both at the reference to his Alpha as a novelty, a curiosity to be gawked at, and at the implications. But there was the angle.

"So this is about Scott. You knew Noshiko wouldn't meet your price, so you sent her to Scott. Knowing that would bring him to you sooner or later."

Alberich raised his brow. "You are a clever little thing, aren't you?"

Don't take the bait, Luke. Don't let the all powerful ancient as fuck dickbag provoke you.

"Why do you want Scott?"

"Nostalgia, perhaps." Alberich shrugged. "As I said, it's been a long time, and who knows how long til the next one. If there is another to come at all."

He sighed. "None of you are what you used to be. You were all meant to be so much more than…this. But you just couldn't resist succumbing to those baser human urges, could you? And so you took a gift and squandered it all on senseless feuds and violence. The novelty of that, I assure you, has long since worn off."

"What are you talking about?"

The Fae just looked at him coolly. "Who do you think made you, little wolf?"

Lucas frowned. Not something he'd spent a lot of time thinking about, but: "I mean, there are stories. About Deucalion and Zeus. The gods, right?"

Jesus. Was this guy saying the gods were actually _real_?

"And what," asked Alberich, "do you think they called the gods…when they stopped calling them gods?"

Umm.

_Fuck me._

The Fae, the - fuck, whatever the hell he was, teased a hand across his mouth, savoring their stunned reactions. "That's the danger of names, pup. You call someone something new, and you convince yourself that becomes the new reality. That they've somehow been altered to fit their new designation, but really…nothing's changed at all, has it? They're the same as they ever were, just addressed by a new random assignation of phonetics and syllables."

He stood, the air suddenly thrumming with nervous excitement, the wolf inside Lucas practically standing on hind legs in its need to break free.

"Tell your Alpha he can have my aid against Akio, if he desires it. All he has to do is come ask for it himself."

"As long as he meets your price, right?" Lucas spat. Because no fucking way this freakshow, god or no god, just wanted a little chat with Scott out of some fucked up sense of nostalgia. "What happens if I don't tell him?"

"Tell him or don't, boy. I leave that entirely up to you. I'm certain I shall have my entertainment either way."

His posture changed, a shift in the air then, a scent in the wind conveying he was about to depart.

"Wait!" Lucas shouted. Alberich regarded him patiently, those strange cat-eyes still alight as Lucas fought to form words from the scattered chaos the Fae had made of his thoughts. "You say you made us, that you made werewolves. Why?"

The Fae's head tilted to the side, for the first time his face a mask of something other than amusement. "Why?" He repeated slowly, mouth twisting as though he found the word wholly unfamiliar and had no idea what to do with it. "Why what?"

"What was the point? Why did you make us?"

Alberich's eyes were utterly alien in their confusion. Cool. Inhuman. Still amused, but the patient humor of a parent explaining something he found plainly obvious to a child.

"Because we could."

Lucas blinked at that. There was no way not to. By the time he opened his eyes again, the Fae was gone. The throne was gone, the forest was gone. The walls were back as they should be, the balconies above with their ropes of dead ivy hanging just above his head. The fountain quietly burbling. The door, ten feet behind them.

"Can we get out of here now?" Corey asked fervently. Lucas nodded. They got the hell out.

Supernatural strength and stamina drove their legs into the pavement at a speed any Olympic athlete would blanch at. It carried them a good four miles before they finally slowed enough to match the paces of the pedestrians mobbing the sidewalks downtown. They stopped at a crosswalk. Lucas whipped out his cellphone and frantically texted, fingers flying in his haste.

"Umm." Corey said. Voice pitched low, both to avoid being overheard, but just as much in sheer disbelief. "Just to recap - did you just yell at a _god_?"

"I have no fucking clue," Lucas said. He'd reflect on that part later and figure out then if retroactively pissing his pants was warranted.

_Are you at home? Is Scott there?_ He texted Tracy. Her response came only moments later.

_Yes, and no. Why, what's up?_

"Are we missing something about this whole True Alpha thing?" Corey continued, too preoccupied to even wonder what Lucas was doing. Not that he could blame his boyfriend. Like, literally, what the HELL just happened? "I mean, why is it such a big deal to everyone? It's not like Scott got any special power-up from it or anything, there's no secret decoder ring, so what the hell is everyone's fucking obsession?"

"I don't know Cor," Lucas snapped, a growl escaping as his control slipped. The younger boy flinched and he immediately regretted everything but there was only so much he could process at one time and he was only human and give him five freaking seconds to catch a goddamn breath please?

_Need to talk. Meet us at Central Park. Bring Malia, don't tell anyone else._

Her reply was nearly instant.

_What the fuck? Freaking me out, Luke, what the hell is going on?_

_Just do it Trace._

"C'mon," he said to Corey, impatiently setting off once more. Brow furrowed, Corey opened his mouth to inquire further, but whatever he saw in Lucas' face made him shut it. And god, was he ever going to nurse a guilt complex about that later. He just really needed to be freaked out right now, okay?

They waited for the girls under a bridge in Central Park, far enough away from the main paths that they were unlikely to attract attention. Lucas couldn't keep his eyes from darting towards every bush and tree, every shadow the lampposts cast across the ground. Alberich's claims rang ominously in his ears. Could he see them or hear them or whatever here? Should they have gone to some abandoned warehouse or something instead? How the fuck were you supposed to hide from someone who claimed to be a fucking _god_?

He caught Tracy's scent and turned towards the approaching girls in relief. Stopped when he realized Josh was with them. The Asian girl shrugged.

"He was with me when I got your text and you freaked me the hell out. Couldn't exactly ditch him after that."

"Why did you want her to ditch me anyway?" Josh asked crossly. "What's going on?"

Malia said nothing, stopping in front of Corey and Lucas and looking between them. Her nostrils flared as she took in the stench of fear and anxiety and adrenaline still roiling off them in waves.

"What happened?"

They told her. Lucas starting and Corey chiming in wherever his voice faltered, their words tumbling over each other's in their haste to get it all out. About the house and how it changed in an instant, the Fae's cool inhumanity, the way their wolves went berserk just to be nearer to him. When they were finally done, the tidal wave of suppressed emotions and observations slowing to a trickle that finally dribbled to a stop, Josh exploded.

"What the fuck are we doing talking about it here then? You need to be telling Scott this, not us!"

"I -," Lucas started. Stopped. Wet his lips. Malia watched him, face inscrutable, but she nodded. He tried again. "I'm not sure we should."

Josh stared, speechless. For all of two seconds. "Are you fucking kidding me? He sends you to this house to find out who Yukimura met, turns out it's a freaking GOD who claims to have made werewolves in the first place, says he can help deal with this nogitsune freak if Scott asks, and you don't think we should tell Scott? Of course you have to tell him!"

"Yukimura said no, Josh," Lucas yelled back, the few fragile threads keeping him in control finally snapping beneath the weight of the night's events. His eyes flared and the wolf caged within his chest lunged against the bars. Josh actually took a step back. "Do you get that? The woman so desperate to protect her daughter she came to a pack of fucking teenagers - she went to a god first, he told her his price, and she said no. I don't know about you, but when a thousand year old kitsune won't say yes to a deal even to save her own daughter, I think that's pretty goddamn significant!"

Josh pursed his lips, his face mutinous. "Why did you even tell us then? You've obviously already made up your mind, why bother saying anything at all?"

"What exactly did you call us here for, Lucas?"

He whipped back to meet Malia's pitiless gaze. He couldn't begin to guess where she was falling on this, her control was way too ironclad for that. No one was more loyal to Scott than the twins and her, but did that mean she was pissed at him for even thinking of keeping this from Scott, or that she agreed with him? He glanced down at Corey, who looked as helpless as he felt.

"It's too big," he finally whispered. Begging them to understand. They weren't there, they didn't know, but…they had to understand. Maybe he was the biggest coward in the world, but he needed someone to get it, to take this away from him, to pass the buck to. Some of that must have leaked through, because Malia's face gentled ever so slightly. He'd never have seen it if he wasn't looking for it, but the tiny softening around her eyes was like a rope thrown to a drowning man, because fuck, he was in way over his head. "I don't know what to - I shouldn't be making a decision like this. It shouldn't be my call, you know? I just - whatever this Fae, this _god_, whatever he wants, Yukimura said no, but Scott will say yes, won't he? I mean, I'm right, aren't I? Whatever it is, he'd say yes anyway."

"He would," Malia agreed, as if there'd ever been any doubt. "Corey? What do you think?"

The youngest among them shrank under the others' combined attention, chewing nervously at his lip. He shook his head then, eyes gold and resolute. "You can't let him say yes. Alberich - whatever he wants, its nothing good, you could feel it. You can't let Scott say yes to him, you just can't."

"You're asking us to lie to our Alpha," Josh said, face screwed up in misery. Lucas' heart thudded just a little bit harder at that because it meant even Josh understood, no matter how much he didn't want to. Relief washed through him; he was right. He knew he was right, but-

"I'm asking you to protect your Alpha," Malia said, taking that weight off Lucas once and for all. Whatever happened next, he'd done his part, right? It wasn't up to him anymore. It should never have been up to him.

Tracy rested her hand on Josh's arm. "You know Scott will pay any price to protect us. Hasn't he paid enough already?"

"It's not just us though." Josh snatched his arm away, spun restlessly, ran his fingers through his hair. His own eyes flickered erratically, shifting back and forth between human and wolf every time his scent spiked with a fresh wave of emotion. "It's Beth and Zach and Liam and Lori. We're out of our league here, you all know we're so fucking out of our league here - what if saying yes to this guy is the only way to keep them all safe? What about Connor? It's not just the nogitsune, it's Kali and Julia and who the fuck knows who else, what if saying yes is the only way to protect them, and Scott doesn't even know until it's too late to do anything about it?"

"Then it's up to us to make sure it doesn't get to that point," Malia said. "Anyone tries to lay a hand on Connor, they have to go through me. That'd be true whether we had this Fae's help or not. If we do our job right, if we can be enough, then that's all that matters.

"It's really that simple for you, isn't it?" Josh laughed bitterly. "Don't you get it? That's the whole problem. What if we're not enough?"

"Then be better," she said in a voice as firm as iron. He set his jaw and shook his head.

"We shouldn't be doing this," he said, his own voice as threadbare and ragged as hers was rock-solid. It was the protest of someone who's already given up. "This feels wrong."

"That's because it is wrong," Malia said. "That doesn't mean it's not necessary."

"You didn't see what he was like," Lucas said, trying to ease some of the anguish on his friend's face. It was easy to forget sometimes how deep Josh's loyalties truly ran. He just wasn't someone who did anything halfway.

"Whatever Luke," he said. "I'm obviously outvoted here. Do what you want, I won't say anything. But this is a mistake. It's a mistake and doesn't matter if you wanna admit it or not, you all fucking know it."

Tracy reached for his shoulder again, but Josh shook her off. "Don't touch me," he growled, stalking off into the darkness.

"I'll keep an eye on him," Tracy told Malia softly. "We'll be home later."

She darted off in pursuit, leaving just the three of them lingering under the bridge.

"I'll tell Scott you checked in with me earlier and didn't find anything at the house," Malia said without looking at either of them. "You two should probably go wind down. Have sex or something. Whatever."

Lucas and Corey stared at each other, wide-eyed. Not that they were opposed, like that was really something he could use right now, Lucas figured, but…

"You reek of guilt," she said bluntly. "Scott will know something's wrong right away. You need to go cover it up somehow. Try not to be alone with him for the next few days, but don't be obvious about avoiding him."

Lucas nodded. "Are you going to tell the twins?"

"No. Aiden would never keep anything from Scott."

Which seemed to imply she knew Ethan would, but Lucas decided not to touch that. The intricacies of the original four pack members' dynamic was not something anyone else had ever been inclined to poke at. Still, he couldn't help himself from asking.

"Have you ever done this before? Kept something like this from Scott?"

Malia finally looked at him.

"Once," was all she said.

"Do you ever regret it?"

"No."

Problem was, he couldn't even begin to guess if she was lying.

"You're an idiot," Ethan told his brother for the third time this hour, thirteenth time this day, umpteen millionth time this life.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones," Aiden sang.

"And you're going to get us both caught," Ethan finished for him. He shouldered his backpack and pushed through the mass of students swarming towards the exit. It was only two days in and he already hated literally everything about high school. It was the actual worst. He was pretty sure it was even worse than the Dread Doctors' experiments - okay, that was hyperbole. Still. He was in a mood, and his brother's idiocy was not helping.

"What were you thinking?" Ethan asked, hissing his exasperation under his breath. None of the Hale pack were remotely nearby to overhear. He'd already become adept at tracking their movements, not that that was difficult. The entire lot of them were about as subtle as a herd of elephants. To be fair, it wasn't like any of them had the McCall pack's experience (or motivation) to stay well hidden and constantly alert. But Ethan wasn't particularly interested in being fair at the moment. He was cranky, he missed his pack, Beacon Hills werewolves were idiots, his brother was an idiot and high school was the actual worst.

"Seriously, saying yes to a date with Lydia? When you know damn well that her pack's already suspicious of us and just using that to try and dig up dirt to prove we're not who we say we are? When you know damn well that there's plenty of dirt to dig up because spoiler alert! Guess what? We're not actually who we say we are?"

"First off, calm down, you're being hysterical," Aiden said, pushing through the double doors at the end of the hall and emerging into late afternoon sun. Ethan sub-vocalized his growl and imagined ripping off his twin's arm and beating his condescending face in with it.

"Second, I don't think Lydia's actually pack? She doesn't quite have the scent. I think she's more just…pack adjacent. An accessory. Well, I mean, really it's more like they're accessories for her," he laughed.

"Oh my god," Ethan said. "You're into her. This wasn't some idiotic scheme to get closer to the Hale pack, this was you saying yes because you're actually into her and have somehow convinced yourself this isn't going to end badly, when, oh yeah, spoiler alert! It's absolutely going to end horrifically!"

"Okay, lose the whole spoiler alert thing. I'm already over it. You tried it, it didn't work out, let it die."

"Could you focus? And what about the part where Scott specifically told us not to do this sort of thing? Did you just completely miss that?"

"Umm, no, I was there," Aiden said as they cut across the quad towards the woods at the far edge of campus. The rest of the student body was migrating towards the parking lot in a mass exodus heralding the end of the school day. It was so ritualistic. So mundane. People actually did this every single day? Ethan shuddered at the thought. He was already going crazy and it hadn't even been a whole week of mindless repetition yet.

"In fact," his brother continued, holding up a finger for emphasis, "I _specifically_ remember he said we were not to seduce anyone!"

He beamed triumphantly, as though he'd just made some brilliant argument. Ethan stared at him.

"Right. So?"

"So, he didn't say we couldn't _be_ seduced. I'm not seducing anyone! I'm just being open to Lydia seducing me."

Ethan wondered if he looked this obnoxious himself when he was being that smug.

"Semantics," he retorted, rolling his eyes. Aiden pondered that.

"I don't know what that word means, so I'm just going to choose to ignore it," he said loftily.

Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose, a migraine imminent, werewolf healing or no.

"Look," his brother continued. "It's not like I wasn't thinking when I said yes. Like you said, we know that they're suspicious of us, we know she and Danny are trying to seduce us basically, and we know that we're both hot as fuck and suave as hell. Someone like Lydia Martin comes up to someone like me and I shoot her down, you think that was going to make them less suspicious?"

"You've found the perfect marriage between ego and logic," Ethan marveled. "How did you do that?"

"I'm just saying, I had to play along! It was my best move. Gotta maintain my cover as an ordinary teenage boy not immune to Lydia's considerable charms."

"Spoken like a true expert."

"Well, I pretty much am."

"You're the furthest thing from an expert. You've never been undercover before. You know what else you've never been before? On a date."

Aiden squinted. "So?"

"You do realize that Lydia Martin is in fact not as ditzy as she pretends to be, right? Like, you're not that oblivious? You picked up that it's a total act?"

"Yeah duh," Aiden said. "It's one of the things I like about her. She has layers."

Ethan sighed. "She has an IQ that puts most rocket scientists to shame, if I'm betting right. That's what she has. And she's going on a date with you to try and put that considerable intellect to use figuring out if there's something suspicious about you."

"What's your point?" Aiden asked impatiently.

They reached the edge of the woods and wove between the trees, putting as much cover between them and the campus as possible. Ethan stopped and faced his brother.

"You said it yourself. We passed ourselves off as the exciting new transfer students at the top of the food chain. Social equals to someone like Lydia. She's expecting to go on a date with a total player who's probably got as many ex-girlfriends as she has ex-boyfriends."

"It's not like I'm a virgin," Aiden scowled.

"No, you're not," Ethan said patiently. "But you're not hopping into bed with her, you're taking her on an actual date. Something that, again, you have zero experience with. How long do you think it's going to take someone like Lydia to pick up on the fact that you have no clue what you're doing? You think she's not going to find it weird that someone like you is acting like he's on his very first date?"

His brother scratched at his eyebrow. Sighed and stared pensively off into the woods. "Okay fine, it's possible I didn't think this all the way through," he conceded. "All the more reason for you to say yes when Danny asks you. Then all four of us can go together and we can keep an eye on each other and step in with a distraction whenever it smells like they're starting to get suspicious."

"This is exactly what I'm talking about," Ethan exhaled. "How many people do you think go on double dates with their brothers? You think that's not going to weird Lydia and Danny out?"

"Why would that be weird?" Aiden asked, baffled. "It's not like we're all going to end up in the same bed afterwards, we're talking about dinner."

Ethan shrugged. "I'm just saying, I'm pretty sure they're going to think it's weird."

"Well I think that's weird," Aiden huffed. Ethan rolled his eyes. This was getting them nowhere.

"I want this," Aiden said, unexpectedly serious all of a sudden. It was enough to grab his attention. Earnest wasn't a look that his brother wore all that often. "Look, I know it's stupid. I know it's not real and they're faking it and we're faking it and it's all going to be one giant lie-fest. But you're absolutely right, I've never been on a date! Neither of us have. And we don't have to wonder if these two would freak out or be horrified if they knew we were werewolves, because we already know they're friends with werewolves."

Aiden sighed and clasped his hands behind the back of his head.

"It's one date. Even knowing we're all lying about stuff, we at least know they're somewhat into us. We at least know even if they knew the truth, it's not like they'd stop seeing us as human. When are we ever going to get a chance like that again? To try this, even if it's just make believe? I mean, don't you ever just want to pretend? Just to see what it feels like, to be normal for a change?"

"No," Ethan shrugged helplessly. "I don't. Because it's not real, it _is_ just pretend. What's the point of that? I can't make myself believe a lie just because I want to. Even if it's just for a little while."

Aiden set his jaw stubbornly. "Well maybe I can. And I want to."

Goddammit. When did his brother turn into such a dreamer? He blamed Scott, honestly he did. "You know there's no happy ending here, right? There's no scenario where this ends any way but badly."

"No shit," Aiden snorted. "I'm not actually an idiot, you know."

"I know. I just - you're going to get hurt, and I just don't understand why you want to."

His brother shrugged listlessly. "Everything hurts anyway. At least this will be a new kind of hurt."

He shook his head. "Fine. I'll go along with this. Under protest. I still think this is stupid."

"Seriously?" Aiden brightened immediately. Ethan tried not to be as affected by that as he was. See, this was exactly why people were always saying they were codependent. "It's not going to be as bad as you think, just wait. You'll see. Mahealani will thaw your cold, jaded heart with his burning loins."

"Oh my god, stop talking. I'll take it back, I swear to god."

"Too late, no take-backsies," his twin crowed. How was it possible they'd shared a womb?

"You're a child."

"And you're the bestest brother in the whole wide world," Aiden sang in an absolutely infantile voice. He threw his arms around his twin in a bear hug that would have shattered bones in anyone but another werewolf.

"Stop it. Stop it right now. God, you're such a freak."

"I know you are but what am I?"

"I hate everything," Ethan grunted sourly. Aiden just laughed as he stripped and tossed his clothes atop his backpack. "Be careful, alright? Meet me at the hospital as soon as you're done."

"Yes, mother," Aiden rolled his eyes. Rolled his shoulders. Cocked his head from side to side and gave a shudder that wracked his entire body with a single continuous spasm. He fell forward on all fours, his back shivering as coarse gray fur sprouted along its length. Arms and legs slimmed down, hands and feet became paws. His brother's head came back up, a fully lupine face with his tongue hanging happily out the side of his mouth. Fully transformed, the gray wolf darted forward and nipped at his heels before racing off into the dense undergrowth, headed towards the Preserve and the Hale house.

Ethan sighed and retraced his steps back up to the campus, across the quad and to the parking lot where his motorcycle was parked. He tried his best to suppress the discontent that arose any time his brother full-shifted. It dulled their connection, and more than that, it freaked the fuck out of him. He'd never understand how Aiden and Malia could be so cavalier with their full transformations. Neither he nor Scott had gone anywhere near a full shift since that first fateful escape from the Dread Doctors. Almost getting stuck in wolf form once had been more than enough for the both of them, thanks very much.

He clambered atop his bike and revved the engine, peeling out of the parking lot and headed west for Beacon Hills Memorial. Malia and Aiden had too much control for that to ever happen to them now, he was pretty sure. Didn't make it any less disquieting watching his brother transform back into the shape that had almost consumed them. Granted, none of them had any idea what the fuck they were doing that first time. They hadn't even known it was possible. Whatever the Dread Doctors had done that last day that finally pushed Scott over the edge, given his eyes that red True Alpha glow, it hadn't been anything even they'd been expecting. Somehow the things that made them unique, freaks even among freaks, had all become linked when Scott's ascension to Alpha turned the four of them from a collection of omegas into an actual pack. Malia's full shift ability, Ethan and his brother's ability to sense each other, feel each other's pain even over vast distances, Scott's resistance to certain kinds of magic…it'd given them the edge they needed to break free of their cages and escape. It'd only meant losing Theo. Not to mention four months of their lives, wandering the woods as three wolves and a coyote. And if they hadn't been so disoriented, so panicked by their own power and afraid of regressing back into their near feral full-shifts, maybe they wouldn't have been so quick to trust Kali…

The hospital arose on the horizon just in time to distract Ethan from slipping further down Memory Lane. Now was not the time to be revisiting that fucked up period of their lives. Course, the ideal time to be thinking about Kali's pack was Never, but that unfortunately was not a luxury they could afford. Not if they were right about what they'd find in the hospital morgue.

Ethan parked his bike and headed up to the third floor in search of the Nurses' Station. A little light flirting with the cute orderly and he found himself behind an unattended terminal, racing through the steps Tracy had outlined for him over the phone earlier today. He had no idea what the fuck any of the things he was typing meant, but following orders got the job done. One hack later he was in the morgue inventory files, scrolling through the most recent additions. He jotted down the drawer number and exited out of everything just in time to slip out from behind the desk as a slim dark-haired nurse rounded the corner. The world crashed to a halt, time slowing to a crawl, the background beeps of hospital equipment fading into white noise.

"Can I help you with something?" Melissa McCall asked, features tight with wary concern. Ethan could only imagine how he must look, like some kind of addict or brain damaged patient, mouth soundlessly searching for words that refused to come. He'd expected to find Scott's mother at the hospital. He hadn't expected to literally run into her.

"Are you alright?" She pressed when speech continued to elude him. He managed a nod that time, and the creases in her forehead eased slightly as she steered him towards a chair. "Here, let's sit you down for a second."

"I'm fine," Ethan said, panic rebooting his mental faculties as heads started to turn their way. This was not the kind of attention he needed to be drawing. He just had been completely unprepared to have that kind of reaction. The four of them were used to memories bleeding through the strange connection they shared. On more than one occasion, Ethan had found himself dreaming of his Alpha's mother, seen through the lens of one of Scott's childhood memories. Given that he and his brother's memories of anything before they were ten simply didn't exist, Melissa McCall was just about the only image he had of what a loving parent was supposed to look like. Apparently that had left more of an impression on him than he'd realized, the face to face encounter with his Alpha's long-lost mother raising an ache that was half Scott's, half his own yearning for the mother he couldn't remember. Assuming he'd ever had one at all.

"I just got a little dizzy for a second there. Low blood sugar," Ethan lied smoothly. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to freak you out."

"Oh," Melissa's expression cleared up with a relieved laugh. "It's no problem at all, the hospital's probably a good place to be if you're going to have a spell like that."

"Blood sugar problems? Bummer," a voice spoke up from just a few feet behind him. Ethan closed his eyes and silently swore. Of all the times to get distracted. Great, now he was probably going to have to pretend to be diabetic at school too. "It's Ethan right? Or are you the evil twin?"

He opened his eyes to see Stiles standing next to a slightly confused Melissa, looking between her and Ethan with a look of deep suspicion. Danny offered an apologetic wave from a few feet behind him.

"What makes you think Aiden's the evil twin?" Ethan countered. He was in total agreement with his brother on one thing. They really did not see what Scott saw in this guy.

"Don't answer a question with another question, Ethan-or-perhaps-Aiden," Stiles said, eyes narrowing.

"It's Ethan," Danny interjected hastily. "They're not totally identical, Stiles."

"Oh. Well then wasn't there something you wanted to ask Ethan, Danny?"

"I don't think now's really a good time," Danny hissed, face purpling as he shot an embarrassed glance at Ethan. The werewolf bit back an inappropriate smile. It certainly wouldn't make any of this less awkward, even if the normally composed Hawaiian boy looked adorable when embarrassed. For the briefest of moments, Ethan could totally see the appeal of his brother's fantasies of a normal date.

"Oh come on, Danny, don't be shy," Stiles said. "He's just a little nervous about asking if he can take you to dinner sometime."

"Stiles!"

"Depends," Ethan said, his own eyes narrowing in response. He was somehow less amused by this kid's attempts to pimp out his friend than he was by Danny's clearly reluctant attempts to play the seducer. "Will you be there?"

"No he will not," Danny cut in, silencing Stiles with a withering glare. "I'm sorry about Stiles. He has boundary issues."

Ethan smirked. "Get to know my brother a little better. Then we'll compare and contrast."

"Well as long as we can do it over that dinner," Danny smiled back. It really was a nice smile, Ethan decided. Ugh god. Now he was getting the feelings too. This was either Scott or Aiden's fault. Maybe both.

"I'm sure we can come up with something better to talk about at dinner than my brother and your…Stiles."

"I'm optimistic," Danny said. Behind him, Stiles clapped his hands sharply.

"Okay, great, see you guys can flirt. Badly, but everyone's a work in progress. Danny will text you later, Ethan. Now we've gotta get back to that thing we came to ask Melissa about. Remember the thing, Danny?"

"Were you dropped on your head as a baby?" Danny glowered, exasperated.

"It's okay. I should probably get going anyway," Ethan said with a slight smile. Only aimed at one of them. "I'll look forward to your texts."

"Smooth," Stiles told him. "Very smooth. This is the start of an epic love story for the ages, I can already tell."

"I'm going to murder you," Danny announced.

With a final wave, Ethan left them to their bickering and backed down the hallway, ducking behind a corner the second he was out of sight. He focused his hearing.

"Okay what was that all about?" He heard Melissa ask, bewildered.

"New transfer student," Stiles said. "He and his brother are evil. Probably doppelgangers, maybe clones. Not sure yet."

"They're not evil," Danny sighed. "Stiles is just paranoid. As usual."

"Okay, then," Melissa said. That seemed to have cleared up a lot for her. "What are you two doing here anyway?"

"We need an itsy bitsy favor," Stiles said.

"It's about the body brought into the morgue earlier today," Danny said. It was Melissa's turn to sigh.

"This is a werewolf thing, isn't it?"

"Are you kidding me?" Ethan hissed, clapping a hand over his mouth when that came out louder than he intended. What the fuck, was everyone in this goddamn town involved with the Hale pack? This Derek guy had no sense of discretion whatsoever.

And he probably didn't have much time to get to the morgue ahead of Danny and the malignant growth attached to his side. Shaking his head in exasperation at everything, Ethan set off at a quick pace through the maze of hospital corridors. It didn't take much guesswork to figure out the way to the morgue was down, and if his nose couldn't lead him to a bunch of corpses from there, he didn't deserve to be called a werewolf.

He found the nearest stairwell and raced down, clearing several steps at a time. He was midway between the first and second floors when the door to the ground level opened, and the scent of an unfamiliar werewolf hit him full in the face. He swore and backtracked immediately, darting back up to the second floor landing and ducking out into the hallway where he came face to face with his brother.

"What are you wearing?" Was the first thing to pop into his head, because really, that shade of green was not Aiden's color. Which meant it wasn't his either. Good to know.

"Scrubs," Aiden said impatiently. "Duh. I didn't have time to go back for my clothes. Hale's on his way here, he's coming to look at the body."

"He's already here," Ethan said. "Stairwell, ground floor. Couple others with him, but they were all headed upstairs instead of down to the morgue. No idea why."

"Who cares? Gives us a chance to get to the body before they completely fuck it up."

"That bad huh?" They hastened to the elevator, Aiden impatiently jabbing the door close button as an orderly frantically waved for them to hold it. He snorted.

"His cup doth not overfloweth with competence, I'm just saying. You should have heard some of the guesses he and his pack were coming up with for these two murders. They're not even in the ballpark of dark druid sacrifices."

"Not every pack can have our…intimate experience with psycho megalomaniac magic users," Ethan said diplomatically.

"Lucky shits."

He didn't disagree.

The doors chimed open and after a quick sniff to make sure the coast was clear, they hurried down the corridor towards the unmistakable smell formaldehyde.

"Find out anything else useful?"

"Just that he and the Argents pretty much hate each other's guts and I have no idea how they haven't all killed each other yet."

"Probably has something to do with their daughter dating one of Hale's wolves," Ethan mused. Thankfully the morgue was empty. At least something was going their way today, he thought as they hunted for the right drawer.

"One of his wolves? Hah, try two," Aiden snickered. "Lahey and that blonde girl."

"Really? Both of them? Damn. What's it say when the only person I'm starting to like in this fucking town is the hunters' kid?"

"Oh come on, you're really telling me you don't like Danny even a little bit?"

Ethan rolled his eyes. "He's not completely terrible."

"You do like him," Aiden crowed triumphantly. "I knew it. You want to date him. You want Scott to bite him and make him your werewolf lover."

"Please, if he wanted the bite he could have gotten it from Hale already. The guy hands it out like it's a goddamn party favor."

"Maybe Danny just has better taste than to let himself be turned by a Fail Wolf. Get it? Rhymes with Hale wolf?"

"Pretty proud of that one aren't you? And you gave me shit for my spoiler alert thing?"

They finally found the right drawer and Aiden yanked it open with a mighty heave. It rolled out, all humor dying on their lips at the sight of the young man in his mid-twenties, with a high and tight military haircut. Ethan's eyes met his brother's grimly. They'd seen the markings on the body way too many times before. The strangulation, the knife wounds, the pungent sting of mistletoe in their nostrils. A three-fold death. She was probably gunning for warriors, from the looks of it. Sacrifices for strategy, tactics, martial ability.

There was no denying it. Julia was in Beacon Hills, had been even before they got there.

And she was girding herself for battle.

"Well crap," Aiden said succinctly.


End file.
